[I]t is time for Dell to allow an independent open source community to take the reins of the Crowbar project.
Dell “will stop sponsoring engineers to be committing and supervising the [Crowbar] project,” meaning they that the company is no longer funding developers to work on Crowbar. As Crowbar lead Rob Hirschfeld points out in his post on the topic, he and other community members will continue to work on Crowbar as an independent project.
He summarizes Crowbar’s positioning well:
In the open DevOps bare metal provisioning market, there is nothing that matches the capabilities developed in either Crowbar v1 or OpenCrowbar. The operations model and system focused approach is truly differentiated because no other open framework has been able to integrate networking, orchestration, discovery, provisioning and configuration management like Crowbar.
There’s an interesting crop of cloud provisioners out there now and 451 actually is getting a (though slight) rising interest in this topic, as counted by incoming inquiries. As OpenStack cloud is used more and more - esp. for private cloud where it seems to get a lot of interest, as you’d think - I expect the questions about the shortlist for cloud provisioners to rise even more.
Crowbar was the first, as far as I know, bare-metal provisioner for OpenStack and other cloud stacks (well, that’s open source, at least). It’s also notable as one of the few major projects innovated in-house at Dell, which typically adds new technologies through acquisitions or by participating in commodity markets (like servers, desktops, etc.). Back at DevOpsDays Austin 2012, I did a short presentation on best practices learned from doing Crowbar at Dell, “How a BigCo actually got some innovation done – The Longer Story of Crowbar,” there were some fun tips in there.