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 (14 chapters)
OpenStack for Architects
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Instance software security and patching


Under OpenStack, the hypervisor creates and runs independent virtual machines or instances. These instances require software updates and patching separate from the underlying OpenStack infrastructure on which it resides. Updates to the hypervisor and underlying server operating systems are not propagated up to the active workloads and instances; therefore, two strategies must exist-one for instances running on the cloud and another for the cloud infrastructure.

The instance strategy should align with the existing organizational and governance policies that are currently in effect that control patching of existing legacy systems. Since OpenStack launches instances based on images and flavors that may have executable metadata injected into the instance upon boot, there are multiple ways to ensure the latest hardened image is used prior to launching an instance depending on the workload type.

For the traditional, ephemeral workloads commonly found on OpenStack...