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

Hardening hypervisors


The Nova service, one of OpenStack's most complex projects, provides compute functionality in the environment. Nova is very pervasive throughout an OpenStack cloud and interacts with most of the other core IaaS services. Proper configuration of this particular service is an important factor in securing an OpenStack deployment.

Standard Linux hardening practices and hypervisors

The key to security in an OpenStack environment is the configuration and hardening of the virtualization technology, also called the hypervisor. While OpenStack can be configured to use many different hypervisors, by far the most common hypervisor in use is KVM. All of the top operating systems such as RHEL, Ubuntu, and CentOS support the KVM hypervisor. All of the top OpenStack distributions such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Mirantis OpenStack, and HP Helion use KVM as the default hypervisor. Therefore, we will focus our attention on the KVM hypervisor running on Linux for production grade security...