Book Image

OpenStack for Architects

By : Michael Solberg, Benjamin Silverman
Book Image

OpenStack for Architects

By: Michael Solberg, Benjamin Silverman

Overview of this book

Over the last five years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders such as Red Hat have led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Because of its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill-set to design and implement it. This guide leads you through each of the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. At each point, we offer you advice based on the experience we've gained from designing and leading successful OpenStack projects in a wide range of industries. Each chapter also includes lab material that gives you a chance to install and configure the technologies used to build production-quality OpenStack clouds. Most importantly, we focus on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Chapter 1. Introducing OpenStack

At the Vancouver OpenStack Conference in May 2015, US retail giant Walmart announced that they had deployed an OpenStack cloud with 140,000 cores of compute supporting 1.5 billion page views on Cyber Monday. CERN, a long-time OpenStack user, announced that their OpenStack private cloud had grown to 100,000 cores running computational workloads on two petabytes of disk in production. Another 250 companies and organizations across nine industry verticals have announced that they have adopted OpenStack in their data centers.

OpenStack had completely redrawn the private cloud landscape in the five short years of its existence. In this chapter, we'll look at what OpenStack is and why it has been so influential. We'll also take the first steps in architecting a cloud.