Your LEGO Order Has Been Shipped

In preparation for the Red Hat Summit this week and OpenStack Summit in a week, I put together a hardware demo to sit in the RDO booth.

I know, I know – the title has LEGO in it and now I’m talking tech.

Bait and switch, AMIRITE?!?

I promise it’s relevant.

So I put together this little hardware demo…

It ended up being two NUCs – one provisioning the other to build an all-in-one cloud using TripleO quickstart.

I didn’t use all of the hardware in the original demo and this is something I’d ultimately like to do after it all ships back to me.

Originally it was a build with one router for the public network, one switch for the private network, four NUCs – one to provision, one undercloud, one overcloud compute node and one overcloud controller and all the necessary networking and power cables.

Then it evolved to include a Pine64 to demo power management, but that doesn’t actually belong to our project, so I need to return it to its owner in June.

Anyway, LEGOs, RIGHT?!?

Long version longer is that I wanted to rebuild this demo AND build a lego NUC rack, too.

I found instructions on the web that looked simple enough and includes every single brick needed to build a four NUC rack.

If you scroll down to the Bill of Materials, it’s… detailed.

I ran out of time for these events, but it’s something that’s still on my mind for future events, so this week I started ordering the bricks.

And HOLY FREE HOLY I had to order parts from FOUR DIFFERENT STORES.

Thankfully, I could get most of the bricks from LEGO pick a brick despite it being IMPOSSIBLE to search for specific individual bricks. Then, I got the stackable plates from Strictly Bricks.

Then the continuous arches from an obscure shop in the Netherlands. And the roof bricks which are RETIRED by LEGO from ANOTHER obscure shop in the Netherlands.

And the last two I’m not even linking because I don’t remember how I found them or if I actually remembered to ORDER those parts because it took hours of frustrating, painstaking time to find what I did find and I think by the end I totally forgot more than a few things.

Can you tell I ran into some issues?

That I’m frustrated?

But there’s another side of me that’s completely totally OVER THE MOON cause I get to play with LEGO for my JOB.

And, thankfully, that’s the bigger part.

OMG OMG OMG OMG LEGO!! !