OpenStack provisioning

Using Chef to provision to OpenStack instances requires an OpenStack environment to work with. This seems obvious and simple, but with OpenStack, nothing is really obvious and simple. To emphasize this point, let me tell you a story.

My first exposure to OpenStack was in early 2014, when the company I was working for hired a well-respected training company to come onsite and train our team in the setup and use of OpenStack. It was a very expensive engagement, but we were considering the possibility of reducing our reliance on VMware and were looking at OpenStack as a path toward that end. The training was scheduled for full 5 days for about a dozen people. The instructor arrived on Monday morning, and after introductions, we got down to it. After 3 full days of "work," only two people in the class had a working OpenStack environment. Even the instructor's example environment was not functional. On that day, the instructor apologized and bowed out, ending our training...