The cloud has risen in popularity and function in the past few years. Storing data and consuming computing resources on a third party's hardware reduces the overhead of operations by keeping the number of people and owned assets low. For a small company, this could be an opportunity to expand operations, whereas for a large company, this could help to streamline costs. The cloud not only abstracts the management of the hardware that an end user consumes, it also creates an on-demand provisioning capability that was previously not available to consumers. Traditionally, provisioning new hardware or virtualized hardware was a fairly manual process that would often lead to a backlog of requests, thus stigmatizing this way of provisioning resources as a slow process.
The cloud grew in popularity mostly as a public offering in the form of services accessible to anyone on the Internet and operated by a third party. This paradigm has implications for how data is handled and stored and requires a link that travels over the public Internet for a company to access the resources they are using. These implications translate into questions of security for some use cases. As the adoption of the public cloud increased in demand, a private cloud was birthed as a response to addressing these security implications. A private cloud is a cloud platform operated without a public connection, inside a private network. By operating a private cloud, the speed of on-demand visualization and provisioning could be achieved without the risk of operating over the Internet, paying for some kind of private connection to a third party, or the concern of private data being stored by a third-party provider.
Enter OpenStack, a cloud platform. OpenStack began as a joint project between NASA and Rackspace. It was originally intended to be an open source alternative that has compatibility with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud offering. Today, OpenStack has become a key player in the cloud platform industry. It is in its fifth year of release, and it continues to grow and gain adoption both in its open source community and the enterprise market.
In this book, we will explore the components of OpenStack. Today, OpenStack offers virtualization of compute, storage, networking, and many other resources. We will walk though installation, use, and troubleshooting of each of the pieces that make up an OpenStack installation. By the end of this book, you should not only recognize OpenStack as a growing and maturing cloud platform, but also have gained confidence in setting up and operating your own OpenStack cluster.
Chapter 1, Architecture and Component Overview, outlines a list of components that make up an OpenStack installation and what they do. The items described in this chapter will be the outline for most of the rest of the book.
Chapter 2, RDO Installation, is a step-by-step walkthrough to install OpenStack using the RDO distribution.
Chapter 3, Identity Management, is about Keystone, the OpenStack component that manages identity and authentication within OpenStack. The use of Keystone on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 4, Image Management, is about Glance, the OpenStack component that stores and distributes disk images for instances to boot from. The use of Glance on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 5, Network Management, talks about Neutron, the OpenStack component that manages networking resources. The use of Neutron on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 6, Instance Management, discusses Nova, the OpenStack component that manages virtual machine instances. The use of Nova on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 7, Block Storage, talks about Cinder, the OpenStack component that manages block storage. The use of Cinder on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Object Storage, discusses Swift, the OpenStack component that manages object storage. The use of Swift on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 9, Telemetry, discusses Ceilometer, the OpenStack component that collects telemetry data. Swift's command-line usage and basic graph generation are discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 10, Orchestration, is about Heat, the OpenStack component that can orchestrate resource creation within an OpenStack cloud. The templates used to launch stacks will be reviewed. The use of Heat on the command line and through the web interface is covered in this chapter.
Chapter 11, Scaling Horizontally, discusses building OpenStack to be run on off-the-shelf hardware. Ways to expand an OpenStack cloud's capacity are also covered in this chapter.
Chapter 12, Monitoring, introduces one option to use to monitor your cloud's health, considering the fact that there are a large number of moving parts to a running OpenStack cloud.
Chapter 13, Troubleshooting, says that things break and OpenStack is no exception. Each component that has been covered is revisited to offer some tips on how to troubleshoot your cloud when something is not working the way it is expected to.
You will need to have basic skills on a Linux command line, a computer (physical or virtualized) to run an installation on, and an Internet connection to access OpenStack installation resources. Exercises in this book will work off a Fedora installation and will use three computers. While three are used as an example, an all-in-one installation of OpenStack on a single machine is also a very practical deployment to use to learn OpenStack.
This book is for those that are interested in learning more about OpenStack as a cloud platform. This book starts at the beginner's level and is intended as a getting-started guide. Understand that it starts at the beginning of OpenStack and assumes a basic knowledge of system administration and virtualization.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The keystonerc_admin file thus becomes much more than just a storage place for the user's credentials."
A block of code is set as follows:
export OS_USERNAME=danradez export OS_TENANT_NAME=danradez export OS_PASSWORD=supersecret export OS_AUTH_URL=http://192.168.123.101:5000/v2.0/ export PS1='[\u@\h \W(keystone_danradez)]\$ '
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
mylaptop$ ssh [email protected] control# yum update -y control# yum install -y http://rdo.fedorapeople.org/rdo-release.rpm control# packstack --gen-answer-file myanswers.txt
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "When you click on the Create Project button, the Create User form will show up again with all your original data filled in for you and the new tenant's name populated for you."
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