Drafting an initial deployment plan

This book is written to provide best practices for a relatively new role within many organizations-the Cloud Architect. The Cloud Architect's primary function is to take business requirements for Infrastructure or Platform as a Service and design an Infrastructure or Platform as a Service solution which meets those requirements. This requires an in-depth knowledge of the capabilities of the infrastructure software paired with competency in network and storage architecture.

The typical Cloud Architect will have a background in compute and will lean heavily on the Network and Storage Architects within an organization to round out their technical knowledge. Since OpenStack is based on the Linux operating system, most OpenStack Architects will have a deep knowledge of that platform. But as we mentioned earlier, OpenStack is typically delivered as an API and OpenStack Architects will need to have fluency in application development as well.

OpenStack Architects are responsible first and foremost for authoring and maintaining a set of design and deployment documentation. It's difficult to describe an ocean if you've never seen one, so this book will walk you through implementation of the documentation that you will create as you create it.

The first document that we will create is the design document. This may be called something different in your organization, but the goal of the design document is to explain the reasoning behind all of the choices that were made in the implementation of the platform. The format may vary from team to team, but we want to capture the following points:

The design document often goes through a number of revisions as the project is developed. An important step at the end of each iteration of the platform is to reconcile any changes made to the platform with the design document.

Every implementation of OpenStack should start with a deployment plan. The design document describes what's being deployed and why, while the deployment plan describes how. Like the design document, the content of a deployment plan varies from organization to organization. It should at least include the following:

A good deployment plan will document everything that an engineering team needs to know to take the design document and instantiate it in the physical world. One thing that we like to leave out of the deployment plan is step-by-step instructions on how to deploy OpenStack. That information typically lives in an Installation Guide, which may be provided by a vendor or written by the operations team.