6/19: This was CROSS POSTED WITH STACKENGINE
In our quest for fast and cost effective container workloads, RackN and StackEngine have teamed up to jointly develop a bare metal StackEngine workload for the RackN Enterprise version of OpenCrowbar. 
Want more background on StackEngine? TheNewStack.io also did a recent post covering StackEngine capabilities.
While this work is early, it is complete enough for field installs. We’d like to include potential users in our initial integration because we value your input.
Why is this important? We believe that there are significant cost, operational and performance benefits to running containers directly on metal. This collaboration is a tangible step towards demonstrating that value.
What did we create? The RackN workload leverages our enterprise distribution of OpenCrowbar to create a ready state environment for StackEngine to be able to deploy and automate Docker container apps.
In this pass, that’s a pretty basic Centos 7.1 environment that’s hardware and configured. The workload takes your StackEngine customer key as the input. From there, it will download and install StackEngine on all the nodes in the system. When you choose which nodes also manage the cluster, the workloads will automatically handle the cross registration.
What is our objective? We want to provide a consistent and sharable way to run directly on metal. That accelerates the exploration of this approach to operationalizing container infrastructure.
What is the roadmap? We want feedback on the workload to drive the roadmap. Our first priority is to tune to maximize performance. Later, we expect to add additional operating systems, more complex networking and closed-loop integration with StackEngine and RackN for things like automatic resources scheduling.
How can you get involved? If you are interested in working with a tech-preview version of the technology, you’ll need to a working OpenCrowbar Drill implementation (via Github or early access available from RackN), a StackEngine registration key and access to the RackN/StackEngine workload (email info@rackn.com or info@stackengine.com for access).
