Owing to the widespread use of OpenStack development around the globe, several enterprises have already started switching to a new and amazing way to gain infrastructural resources and reduce the investment costs of their respective IT environments. What makes this opportunity great is the open source experience that it offers. Well, you may claim that there are several other cloud solutions that are open source as well. What makes OpenStack unique is its exposure; it is widely open to other open source solutions along with being a shining example of a multiport-integrated solution with great flexibility. All that you really need is a good design to fulfill most of your requirements and the right decisions on how and what to deploy.
If you browse the pages of this book, you might wonder what makes a laminated cover entitled Mastering, such a great deal to you as a system administrator, cloud architect, DevOps engineer, or any technical personnel operating on the Linux platform. Basically, you may be working on a project, going on a vacation, building a house, or redesigning your fancy apartment. In each of these cases, you will always need a strategy. A Japanese military leader, Miyamoto Musashi, wrote the following—a very impressive thought on perception and sight—in The Book of Five Rings, Start Publishing LLC:
"In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."
Ultimately, based on what you learned from the OpenStack literature, and what you have deployed, or practiced, you will probably ask the famous key question: How does OpenStack work? Well, the OpenStack community is very rich in terms of topics and tutorials—some of which you may have already tried out. It is time to go ahead and raise the curtain on the OpenStack design and architecture.
Basically, the goal of this chapter is to get you from where you are today to the point where you can confidently build a private cloud based on OpenStack with your own design choice.
At the end of this chapter, you will have a good perspective on ways to design your project by putting the details under the microscope. You will also learn about how OpenStack services work together and be ready for the next stage of our adventure by starting the deployment of an OpenStack environment with best practices.
This chapter will cover the following points:
Getting acquainted with the logical architecture of the OpenStack ecosystem and the way its different core components interact with each other
Learning how to design an OpenStack environment by choosing the right core services for the right environment
Designing the first OpenStack architecture for a large-scale environment while bearing in mind that OpenStack can be designed in numerous ways
Learning some best practices and the process of capacity planning for a robust OpenStack environment
Let's start the mission by putting the spot light on the place where the core OpenStack components come in the first place.