“A Universe from Nothing: Containerized OpenStack Deployment Using Kolla, Ansible and Kayobe.”
Join the Equinix Metal powered workshop at the OpenInfra Summit
Containerization is hot, so it was no surprise that the Kayobe workshop was at capacity at last year’s OpenInfra Summit. Kayobe is a containerized infrastructure deployment for bare metal built on a number of trusted and well-known tools, including Ansible and Bifrost. Of course, this year, the workshop will be virtual. It is guaranteed to garner a large attendance so be sure to sign up now! There is a link at the end of this article. Equinix Metal will once again be providing the underlying bare metal infrastructure to support workshop attendees. The combination of Kayobe’s containerization and the dynamic capabilities of Equinix Metal make for some exciting, next-generation, cloud infrastructure architectures.
Kayobe allows the operator to modify the underlying bare metal infrastructure. How? Kayobe brings together several open source projects to enable containerized OpenStack to bare metal. This includes Bifrost (for the bare metal images), Kolla (for the containerized OpenStack images), and Kolla-Ansible (for the deployment and on-going operation of the cloud infrastructure). By using containers, the control plane (responsible for the on-going operations of the cloud infrastructure) can scale up and down as well as fail over across physical bare metal nodes as needed. Since the control plane is abstracted through containerization from any specific piece of hardware, the operator can modify the bare metal infrastructure, scaling up or down, without having to work around a specific piece of hardware.
The use of Equinix Metal provides two important capabilities. First, it provides a breadth of hardware types, allowing users to select the proper mix of memory, CPU (type and speed), and storage. Second, it provides a deep pool of instantly available bare metal instances. These instances are all provisioned across a worldwide footprint of data centers via the Equinix Metal web portal or via API call. All the bare metal infrastructure required by Kayobe can be deployed in minutes through a series of automated API calls through whatever infrastructure as code tool of choice (i.e. Ansible).
The combination Kayobe and Equinix Metal is unique and provides surprising nimbleness. A Kayobe containerized control plane deployed across Equinix Metal allows an operator to dynamically adapt the cloud as needed. Equinix Metal of different sizes and locations can be added (or removed) from the control plane while Kayobe dynamically shifts the containers across the available physical resources. This allows for an abstraction away from physical infrastructure not normally seen from a control plane.
Sign Up!
If you’re interested in learning more about Kayobe and Equinix Metal, please attend the workshop at the virtual Open Infra Summit. It’s free — sign up here. It runs for 5 days (Monday-Friday) on October 19th-23rd, 2020 and features 200 presentations, workshops and collaborative sessions. The Summit is focused on open infrastructure integration. The hands-on Kayobe workshop is Monday, 10/19/20 from 12:15pm-1:40pm UTC. Look for “A Universe from Nothing: Containerized OpenStack deployment using Kolla, Ansible and Kayobe.”
