Nowadays, OpenStack has become a very mature cloud computing software solution, more so than it ever was before. It is a unique project because of its tremendous growth in setup and development. Now, thanks to OpenStack, it has become possible to build your own cloud in a cheaper, more elegant, and more flexible way. The official OpenStack website, https://www.openstack.org/ defines the reason for using such a great solution:
By looking at the roadmaps of OpenStack's development over the past few years, several open source projects have been incubated under the umbrella of OpenStack, such as big data, databases, security, and containerization technology, and the list is still growing. In each new OpenStack release, a new project becomes more mature and better integrated in the cloud platform. This creates more opportunities to expand the cloud universe functionalities and grow your new next generation data center.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Briefly parsing the OpenStack components and the innovation areas
- Implementing a first architectural design of OpenStack private cloud
- Checking the latest tools and processes to build a production-ready OpenStack environment
- Discussing the needs to adopt the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concept for successful OpenStack management and implementation
- Exploring new opportunities to enlarge the OpenStack setup by tackling the cloud setup in both a test and a production environment using Ansible
