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"Collins exists to drive infrastructure automation. Someone recently asked me to describe collins in a sentence. At Tumblr, it's the infrastructure source of truth and knowledge. Everything about Tumblr production environments is stored and encoded in Collins, and that data is used to drive all of our automation. Sometimes people refer to systems like this as a CMDB, or Configuration Management DataBase. Collins started as a system to manage all of the physical servers, switches, racks, etc in Tumblr production environments. As we started to inventory hardware, IP addresses, software, and so on, we found the API and data gave us an excellent way to drive automation processes. Today Collins can do push button cluster (HBase, Hadoop, web, etc) deployment, drive configuration generation when hardware cluster topologies change, drive infrastructure updates when software configuration changes, and help manage software deploys. Because of the loosely coupled design of Collins, consistently applied conventions are a system requirement. This document serves as a guide to those conventions as well as the basic core concepts of the collins system. If you're just interested in the basic howto or screenshots, click here."

"Razor is an advanced provisioning application which can deploy both bare-metal and virtual systems. It's aimed at solving the problem of how to bring new metal into a state where your existing DevOps/configuration management workflows can take it over. Newly added machines in a Razor deployment will PXE-boot from a special microkernel image, then check in, provide Razor with inventory information, and wait for further instructions. Razor will consult user-created policy rules to choose which preconfigured model to apply to a new node, which will begin to follow the model's directions, giving feedback to Razor as it completes various steps. Models can include a handoff to a configuration management system or to another system capable of controlling the node (such as a vCenter server taking possession of ESX systems)."

"Metal as a Service - MAAS - lets you treat physical servers like virtual machines in the cloud. Rather than having to manage each server individually, MAAS turns your bare metal into an elastic cloud-like resource. What does that mean in practice? Tell MAAS about the machines you want it to manage and it will boot them, check the hardware's okay, and have them waiting for when you need them. You can then pull nodes up, tear them down and redeploy them at will; just as you can with virtual machines in the cloud. When you're ready to deploy a service, MAAS gives Juju the nodes it needs to power that service. It's as simple as that: no need to manually provision, check and, afterwards, clean-up. As your needs change, you can easily scale services up or down. Need more power for your Hadoop cluster for a few hours? Simply tear down one of your Nova compute nodes and redeploy it to Hadoop. When you're done, it's just as easy to give the node back to Nova. MAAS is ideal where you want the flexibility of the cloud, and the hassle-free power of Juju charms, but you need to deploy to bare metal."

Recently Andrew Spyker blogged about his thoughts on the emergence of open-source schedulers and resource managers in parallel with the rise of Docker containers. I'd like to give a point of view to some of the issues that were raised.

Description of the architecture of the Docker based PaaS Flynn. Interesting mention to scheduler, etc.

Even Thoughtworks Chief Scientist spends much more time on automatiing quite simple things with Chef. Not really new stuff for us, but still an interesting read.

Panamax is a containerized app creator with an open-source app marketplace hosted in GitHub.