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Getting started with OpenStack

In the Stacks

Article from ADMIN 38/2017

By Martin Loschwitz

Selecting the correct OpenStack components for your use case and setting up the stack can be highly complex. This first article of a series prepares admins for practical OpenStack applications.

OpenStack has marginalized its rivals with an impressive pervasiveness. Although Eucalyptus and CloudStack were technically on par with OpenStack, today they play only a minor role. The technical body of OpenStack hardly justified the attention it got in the early days, but the solution has now matured significantly, especially in the last two years: Many problems that used to make life difficult for admins have been eliminated, and the biannual OpenStack conferences show that some major corporations now rely on OpenStack.

The greatest practical challenge is its complexity. When you build a cloud environment with several hundred or several thousand nodes, most concepts that are fine for conventional data centers no longer apply, both when planning the physical environment (e.g., structural conditions, racks, servers, hardware, network, and power) and the software that provides the core functionality.

The complexity of the construct means that getting started with OpenStack requires much education and practice, and the path to the first OpenStack installation running on virtual machines (VMs) as a test setup can be long and fraught with pitfalls.

This first part of this series revolves around introducing the most important OpenStack components and methods; these are the current defaults for deploying OpenStack. Part two takes a hands-on approach and describes the OpenStack installation on VMs based on Metal as a Service (MaaS) and Canonical's own automation solution, Juju. Finally, the third part deals with transferring what you have learned into practice: What can be observed in large OpenStack installations in terms of daily life at the data center? How can high availability be achieved? What options are available for software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS)?