OpenStack: Shooting star in the cloud

Assembly Kit

More Information

You will find more information about the OpenStack components on the individual pages of OpenStack website. The documentation of the project is quite impressive [11], and the OpenStack project's wiki offers a plethora of detailed information. For its bug tracking, OpenStack uses Launchpad. The Launchpad Questions feature lets you post more stubborn issues, which are often addressed directly by one of the project developers.

The official IRC channel of the OpenStack project is #openstack on Freenode. You will find experienced OpenStack users on IRC who might be able to help with specific problems.

If you want to try OpenStack, you will find complete installation instructions on the web, and you can get started almost immediately. For a test environment, you just need three virtual machines; you don't even need your own hardware.

OpenStack Releases

The subject of OpenStack version numbers causes much confusion among newcomers to the OpenStack environment: OpenStack basically follows a release plan that envisages a new version every six months.

The year is always part of the version number. The first OpenStack version released in 2012 was thus version 2012.1; the first release in 2013 was version 2013.1. On top of this, codenames are chosen by the OpenStack community, which are far more commonly used: OpenStack 2012.1 went by the name of Essex, 2012.2 was called Folsom, and OpenStack 2013.1 is Grizzly. The next version, which will be released in October 2013, goes by the codename Havana.

Infos

Keystone: http://keystone.openstack.org/
Glance: http://glance.openstack.org/
Ubuntu UEC images: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/
OpenFlow: http://www.openflow.org/
Open vSwitch: http://www.openvswitch.org/
Neutron: http://quantum.openstack.org/
Nova: http://nova.openstack.org/
Cinder: http://cinder.openstack.org/
Swift: http://swift.openstack.org/
Horizon: http://horizon.openstack.org/
OpenStack Wiki: http://wiki.openstack.org

The Author

Martin Gerhard Loschwitz works as a Principal Consultant at hastexo. His work focuses on distributed storage solutions and OpenStack. He is also a developer with the Debian project.

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