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)

Dealing with Infrastructure as a Software


A Vice President of Infrastructure at a large company once told us something like this, "I like hardware. My hardware hardly ever breaks. The software I deploy breaks all the time. When my data center becomes software, how will I ever have a stable platform?". While the same concern could (and probably should) have once been applied to virtualization, most organizations today are very comfortable with the idea of software pretending to be hardware. The software-defined data center is something a little more intimidating, though. While we've had software pretend to be a CPU for a long time, we've only had software pretend to be a storage array relatively recently. Also, when the storage array goes down, everything tends to come down with it.

However, maybe the bigger question is around software constantly breaking on deployment. Indeed, the most successful OpenStack deployments that we've worked with have all adopted modern software development techniques...