OpenStack: Shooting star in the cloud

Assembly Kit

The IT news is beginning to sound like a scene from the movie "Being John Malkovich" in which the hero undertakes a journey into himself and notices that every spoken sentence is replaced by "John Malkovich." In IT, every sentence is cloud, cloud, cloud.

And increasingly, "cloud" means the OpenStack cloud. The open cloud environment supported by the OpenStack project has become everybody's darling. But is the hype justified? This article takes a close look at one of the most interesting projects in the FOSS world.

Reality Check: OpenStack

OpenStack is not a monolithic program. In fact, the name OpenStack now designates a very comprehensive collection of components that join forces to take care of automation. The various OpenStack components each handle a specific part of the overall system. The OpenStack world defines the following automation tasks:

User management
Image Management
Network management
VM management
Block storage management for VMs
Cloud storage
The front end to the user

Each of these tasks is assigned to an OpenStack component. Incidentally: Components in OpenStack always have two names: an official project name and a codename. The article uses the much more commonly used codenames to designate the various OpenStack components.

User Management: Keystone

For customers to be able to configure their services correctly within a cloud computing environment, the system must offer them a user management system. In OpenStack, Keystone [1] ensures that users can log in with their credentials.

Keystone doesn't just implement a simple system based on users and passwords; it also provides a granular schema for assigning permissions. At the

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