OpenStack Summit November 2013

There is no lack of deployment software in the OpenStack market, and each one of them provides great value from different perspective and scenario. These deployment solutions did a great job on software deployment layer based upon OS provisioning tools like Cobbler and configuration management tools like Puppet/Chef, but they generally do not go deep down to networking and server hardware level configuration, which is a key step for large scale OpenStack solution. As part of a networking company and a server vendor, Huawei Cloud team are developing Compass, a system not only for OpenStack software deployment, but also for fully automated hardware level server and networking gear configuration. Our system automates hardware resource discovery, hardware configuration (e.g., hardware RAID configuration, switch configuration), topology-aware OpenStack service deployment and etc. Therefore, end users have a streamlined OpenStack deployment experience with Compass.



We are using Compass for deploying OpenStack cloud in our Telco customer sites and got very constructive feedback for us to make more robust and open deployment solution. We plan to open source our project. One major goal we have in designing the system is to achieve true openness at hardware level, so that other hardware vendors can write plug-in toward their special server designs. Just like OpenStack openness makes it a valuable game-changing cloud solution, we hope we can work with other hardware vendors to make OpenStack universally available on various hardware platforms in a streamlined fashion.