Stacki is an open source tool for provisioning and managing Linux servers at scale. It provides fast, reliable provisioning of servers from bare metal to a fully configured system. PayPal uses Stacki to manage their Hadoop infrastructure, which includes over 3,000 nodes spread across multiple datacenters. Stacki automates tasks like disk formatting, partitioning, OS installation, and integration with other tools to quickly provision new servers. It helped PayPal reduce provisioning time from hours to just 14 minutes for 288 servers.

1. Introduction to Stacki
Greg Bruno, PhD
VP Engineering, StackIQ

2. Open Source Stack Installer
Stacki is a very fast and ultra reliable Linux server provisioning tool … at scale.
With zero prerequisites for taking systems from bare metal to a ping and prompt.

3. PayPal

4. Hadoop @ PayPal
12 x 2TB SATA
data drives
48 nodes
each rack
1GBE-10GBE
NICs
24 x 900GB 6G SAS
10K data drives
24 nodes
each rack
10GBE NIC
8 x 4TB NR-SAS
data drives
10 GBE NIC
Bay Area
Salt Lake City
Las Vegas
DATACENTERS
• 3,000 nodes and growing
• 60+ initial server racks
• Heterogeneous HW
across multiple DCs
Data Science
Infrastructure Footprint
48 nodes
each rack

5. Automation Challenge
Spinout creates some datacenter automation challenges …
• Smaller team but even more to do
• Rethink automation
• Distributed systems have tons of local drives which require
time consuming disk formatting and partitioning, and hardware
RAID config on masternodes
• New provisioning solution needs to easily, flexibly integrate
w/ other commercial, open source, and homegrown
management tools
• Can 100s or 1000s of nodes be (re)provisioned as quickly as
one or a few? (e.g., drive failures mean replacing entire host
from O/S to disk to network to firmware to … etc)

6. Stacki @ PayPal
Ambari HDP
Health Detection
Integration
IPMI/iLOOS Disk Network
DHCP / DNS /
TFTP
Ansible
- Disk Array Controller Configuration
- Disk Partitioning Configuration
“Stacki + Ansible = Happiness. :D” – Stacki mailing list 8/11/15

7. Quick, Early Success
14 Minutes*To Fully Provision 6 Racks of Bare Metal (288 Servers)
Includes wiping all
disks then fully
partitioning & formatting
~3500 drives
And Now…
Upgrades all firmware
automatically
Executes Ansible
scripts on all hosts
Hadoop packages
installed
* Versus hours with other hyperscale management tools, or days to weeks with traditional tools and processes

8. How We Solve the Problem

9. History
• San Diego Supercomputer Center
• 1986 - National Science Foundation
• Along with NCSA only two non-classified centers
• Mission: serve computational scientists
• Rocks
• 2000 - First cluster group inside SDSC
• Version 1.0 released that November as open source
• 10k+ clusters world-wide
• StackIQ
• 2006 - Commercial support for Rocks
• 2011 - Venture Backed
• Focus on next generation clustered systems (Data, Cloud)
• Stacki - 2015
• June – released as open source
• July – first hyper-scale user

10. Must Haves
Make it – Automatic
◦ Think about it, test it. Deploy it.
◦ People don’t scale, software does. Free your people – allow ops guys to be ops/analysis guys, move them from single machine view to
global machine view.
Make it – Repeatable
◦ State of the environment is guaranteed. Does not require homogeneity of hardware or functionality. Make compute environments
homogenous on heterogeneous hardware and software.
◦ Really, nothing is homogenous. Environment maybe, behavior of that environment on different machines while predictable will not be the
same across all hardware. Stacki gets you flexibility and predictability.
Make it – Reliable
◦ You always get what you want when you want it. You can make reasonable estimates of need because you’ve made the environment
predictable and repeatable. Just like science!
Make it – Comprehensive
◦ Manage application layer(s) down to kernels and device configuration with one tool. Never hit the network unconfigured.
◦ Provide turn-key deployment with reasonable default settings and ability to customize / re-wire as desired.

11. Stacki Positioning
DevOps / Configuration Tool
DHCP /
DNS / TFTP
NetworkDiskOS
In-house
developed
deployment
tools
- Disk Array Controller Configuration
- Disk Partitioning Configuration

12. Datacenter Architecture
Frontend
Network
Backend Backend Backend Backend
em1 em1
em1
em1
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13. Download and Boot the ISO
Go to www.stacki.com and download the ISO
◦ It’s 1.8 GB
◦ “stacki” pallet plus stripped down CentOS 6.6
Boot the ISO on the host that will be your frontend

20. Frontend Services
Services to build backend nodes
◦ DHCP
◦ TFTP
◦ Named (optional)
Services to access backend nodes
◦ SSH key management
◦ Parallel execution shell

21. Host Configuration Spreadsheet

22. Frontend
Network
Backend Backend Backend Backend
em1 em1
em1
em1
em1
Backend Installation
Save your Host Configuration spreadsheet as a CSV
Import CSV on frontend
◦ “stack load hostfile file=hosts.csv”
Tell backend nodes to install on their next PXE boot
◦ “stack set host boot backend action=install”
PXE boot all backend nodes
Done!

23. BitTorrent-Inspired Package Installation
Stacki

24. Customizing Your Hosts

25. Advanced Networking
Via Host Configuration spreadsheet, you can configure:
◦ Bonded interfaces
◦ VLANs
◦ Bridging
◦ Any combo of the above
Manage hosts in multiple subnets
◦ Build a single cluster from hosts in multiple subnets
◦ Manage hosts in multiple datacenters

26. Host Configuration Spreadsheet

27. Disk Controller Configuration Spreadsheet

28. Disk Partition Configuration Spreadsheet

29. Multiple Distributions
A frontend houses a default distribution
◦ Based on stripped down CentOS 6.6 or 7.1
◦ Used to build backend nodes
Can add any number of new distributions to a frontend
◦ E.g., RHEL 6.x based distro, CentOS 6.5, etc.
Assign any backend node to any distro

30. Why is this hard and important?

31. Datacenter Architecture
Frontend
Network
Backend Backend Backend Backend
em1 em1
em1
em1
em1

32. Datacenter Host Software Stack
DevOps / Configuration Tool
DHCP /
DNS / TFTP
NetworkDiskOS
In-house
developed
deployment
tools
- Disk Array Controller Configuration
- Disk Partitioning Configuration

33. The “Step 0” Problem
Check namenodes are
empty
Format/start HDFS
Create all directories
Create all metastores
Start services (Hbase, Hive,
Oozie, Sqoop, Impala, etc)
Deploy client configuration Configure database
Setup/assign monitors
(activity, services, and host)
Test database connections
Validate/resolve hostnamesConsistent host timezones
No bad kernel versions
running
(CDH) version consistency
Java version consistency
Daemons versions
consistency
Mgmt Agents versions
consistency
Host specification/SSH
ports
MUCH MORE …
DHCP Server/Client setup TFTP/PXE configuration
Server OS installation
Node OS Install
RAID configuration
Boot configuration
System/data disk
partitioning
Monitoring system setup
and config
Lights Out/IPMI setup
User accounts added and
synced
SSH keys on all hosts
Network node configuration
Config Mgmt install and
configuration
Route configurationOS upgrades/updates
Site specific software and
configuration
Host specification/SSH
ports
Security
Firewall setupCluster Mgmt utility Database install and config
Multiple network configPackage installation MUCH MORE …

34. Clusters are Different
Adding new servers does require coordination
Newly added servers must:
• Have same software stack as original
servers
• Have same configuration as original
servers
• Know about original servers
And, original servers must:
• Know about new servers
Result: The management complexity added to the
Operations staff is “exponential”

35. Exponential Complexity
Number of Servers
ManagementComplexity
General Data Center
Clusters

36. The Pain Curve
Number of Servers
ManagementComplexity
General Data Center
Clusters
PAIN

37. The Pain Threshold
The pain threshold differs for every
organization
Function of:
• cluster(s) size
• number of people in Operations
• Operations staff cluster expertise

38. Moore’s Law
50 1 2 3 4
8
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Time (Years)
Density
18 month
doubling

39. Moore’s Law and Infrastructure Value

40. What it Means for You
50 1 2 3 4
100
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Time (Years)
Value(%)
3 months
90% value
18 months
50% value

41. Time is Money
The clock starts ticking when hosts land on your
loading dock
Without your applications online, you have an
paper weight that consumes power, cooling, and
management’s attention

42. Try It Out

43. stacki.com
Download - www.stacki.com
Source & Docs - github.com/StackIQ/stacki/wiki
Discuss - groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/stacki

44. PayPal’s Options
Bring what we used at former parent company eBay with us.
Build our own soups-to-nuts bespoke bare metal provisioning tool.
Find the perfect open source tool that we can use and grow with.
Not Possible
Not Optimal
Not Likely

45. Quick, Early Success
2 Weeks Instead of 2 Years
To Build a Scale-out Management Solution
1. Installed Stacki Frontend (base management server)
Ran test installations of backend servers
1. Single Server test
2. Full Rack test (48 nodes)
2. Updated distribution (CentOS 6.6) to install additional
packages
3. Integrated IPMI information into Stacki
1. Can now ssh into all IPMI consoles from the Stacki
frontend host using <hostname>.ipmi
4. Re-ran with PayPal kickstart changes/additions and was
able to image 6 racks in 14 minutes, including:
1. Nuking disks/partitions and running a full format of all
data drives
5. Updated the Stacki post-boot piece to do the following:
1. Upgrade firmware if host needs it
2. Runs PayPal Ansible playbook, which:
1. Installs additional packages
2. Creates user accounts
3. Disables unused services
4. Sets up resolver/ntp/syslog-ng/sudoers/limits.
d/sysctl/etc.
5. Installs/configures Ambari agents
6. Checks data drive mounts, fstab
7. Prepares the rack to be added to a Hadoop
cluster
PayPal development with Stacki includes:

46. DevOps Agnostic
DevOps / Configuration Tool
DHCP /
DNS / TFTP
NetworkDiskOS
In-house
developed
deployment
tools
- Disk Array Controller Configuration
- Disk Partitioning Configuration

47. The “Step 0” Problem
Check namenodes are
empty
Format/start HDFS
Create all directories
Create all metastores
Start services (Hbase, Hive,
Oozie, Sqoop, Impala, etc)
Deploy client configuration Configure database
Setup/assign monitors
(activity, services, and host)
Test database connections
Validate/resolve hostnamesConsistent host timezones
No bad kernel versions
running
(CDH) version consistency
Java version consistency
Daemons versions
consistency
Mgmt Agents versions
consistency
Host specification/SSH
ports
MUCH MORE …
DHCP Server/Client setup TFTP/PXE configuration
Server OS installation
Node OS Install
RAID configuration
Boot configuration
System/data disk
partitioning
Monitoring system setup
and config
Lights Out/IPMI setup
User accounts added and
synced
SSH keys on all hosts
Network node configuration
Config Mgmt install and
configuration
Route configurationOS upgrades/updates
Site specific software and
configuration
Host specification/SSH
ports
Security
Firewall setupCluster Mgmt utility Database install and config
Multiple network configPackage installation MUCH MORE …
App Config
Site Config
HW Install
System Performance
Validation
Bare Metal Installers
Hadoop Mgmt Tool
Upgrades/Patching
Disk Configuration
Monitoring Tool
Configuration Tool
Network/Site Config ToolsSystems Mgmt Tool
Others …
MANUAL
SEMI-AUTOMATED
TOOLCHAIN
(w/o StackIQ)
w/StackIQ
FULLY AUTOMATED

48. StackIQ Boss

49. Configuration Database
Server appliance types (e.g. data, namenode, tomcat, …)
Number of CPUs
Disk partitioning
Hardware RAID config
PCI bus information
…
And other System Attributes

50. Attributes
Global
◦ stack set attr
Appliance
◦ stack set appliance attr
OS
◦ stack set os attr
Host
◦ stack set host attr

51. Kickstart Profiles

52. Zoom In

53. Starting from the Empty Set
{ }

54. { os }
© 2009 UC Regents

55. { os, core }
© 2009 UC Regents

56. { os, core, kernel }
© 2009 UC Regents

57. { os, core, kernel, mapr }
© 2009 UC Regents

58. Manage the Deltas
{os, core, kernel, mapr} {os, core, kernel, horton}
© 2009 UC Regents

59. stacki.com
@masonkatz