In this short clip, the creator of Warewulf reflects on how the project evolved across its early versions. He never stepped away from Warewulf, but other work drew heavily on his time, including writing the Singularity container system at Berkeley Lab and the creation of cAos Linux and CentOS.
The first Warewulf was written in Perl. Warewulf 2 was almost an entire reimplementation with a different configuration syntax, so administrators effectively had to set up again, although the premise and ideology stayed the same. As Warewulf 2 grew in popularity, feedback poured in from an opinionated open source community. He describes asking sites how they wanted provisioning to work, over HTTP or a file system like Lustre, what the backend data store and configuration syntax should look like, and finding that everyone said something different.
The clip suits anyone curious about the project's history and the tradeoffs behind its design.
Key takeaways
- The creator stayed involved with Warewulf throughout, but Singularity, cAos Linux and CentOS all competed for his time.
- Warewulf 1 was written in Perl, and Warewulf 2 was nearly a full reimplementation with a different configuration syntax.
- Warewulf 2's rising popularity brought a wave of community opinions on how provisioning and configuration should work.
- When he surveyed sites about transport, data store and config syntax preferences, every site wanted something different.
Questions this video answers
Why was Warewulf rewritten between versions 1 and 2?
Warewulf 1 was a Perl implementation that did things its own way, and its creator says he learned a lot from it. Warewulf 2 kept the same premise and ideology but reimplemented nearly everything, including the configuration file syntax, which meant existing users had to reinstall and set up again rather than upgrade in place.
This video is part of the Warewulf Pro playlist. Browse every CIQ video by product and topic.
Transcript
W okay so at what point so you said that you were always kind of involved with the project there was a point at which the project because now it's matured in a totally different way so what role did you play in the rewrite of Warewulf into go oh 100% uh for the rewrite okay um uh so you asked about if there was like a Hiatus and I guess I said I didn't step away from the project but I definitely had other things going on that kind of leveraged a lot of my time uh container system called Singularity is something I wrote as well um
while I was at Berkeley lab initially and then took it out of Berkeley lab uh as I became an entrepreneur and um but so uh also Warewulf had some interruptions through the creation of chaos Linux and even sentos because sentos happened after that uh the first version of Warewulf uh again Pearl and uh it did things in its own way back then I learned a lot from Warewulf 1 Warewulf 2 was pretty much an entire reimplementation of Warewulf it did things different configuration file syntax was different everything was different but it had the same like kind of major premise and and how it worked it's
it's it's kind of it's it's set up how everything is um configured uh it's ideology Etc so everything was kind of the same from from that perspective but it was implemented very very differently so system administrators and whatnot uh it didn't translate like where everybody using Warewulf one it was a kind of reinstall reset up for Warewulf 2 now Warewulf 2 continued to increase in terms of popularity and got lots of feedback and lots of people who who uh had a lot of opinions about how things should be done because the open source Community has you know we're not shy on opinions uh there's a
lot of them out there well said very delicate so uh what we did was was I I asked around and I said uh various sites and people that I know were either using Warewulf or interested in using Warewulf or interested in a provisioning system and I asked and I talked to a lot of people and I said so if you know if if you wanted this provisioning system if you wanted to use this like how would you do your Prov your provisioning like would it be over HTTP would it be over uh a file system like luster would it be over like all these different
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sorts of ways and what do you want your backend data store to look like what do you want your configuration syntax to look like and and how do you want all this stuff to kind of work and fit together this might be surprising everybody said something different
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