The book assumes a moderate level of the Linux operating system and being familiar with the OpenStack ecosystem. A good knowledge and understanding of networking and virtualization technology is required. Having an experience with containerization will help to move faster through the chapters of the book.
Few examples have been written in Python and YAML that would require a basic knowledge on both languages but not necessary.

The installation of the OpenStack environment can be performed at any environment with available resources. The lab environment in this book uses the following software and tools:

• Operating system: CentOS 7 or Ubuntu 14.04
• OpenStack: Mitaka and later releases
• VirtualBox 5.0 or newer
• Vagrant 2.0.1 or newer
• Ansible server 2.4 or newer
• Python 2.7

The OpenStack installation will require the following hardware specifications:

• A host machine with CPU hardware virtualization support
• 8 CPU cores
• 16 GB RAM
• 60 GB free disk space

Feel free to use any tool for the test environment such as Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant, or
VMware workstation. Many chapters implement a new OpenStack deployment to target the objectives of each one in a fresh installed environment. Feel free to re-deploy OpenStack with different releases across each lab. Make sure that you target the right release with the supported projects. This page can be a good reference to compare different OpenStack releases: https://releases.openstack.org/.

At the time of writing this book, several packages are being developed for new releases. Some old versions might go to end of life. This does not cover the operating system version or system management tools. It is recommended to check the latest version for each package that might not be available anymore based on the provided links throughout this book.

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packtpub.com.
2. Select the SUPPORT tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Extending-OpenStack. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ExtendingOpenStack_ColorImages.pdf.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Install the nova-docker plugin."

A block of code is set as follows:

... 
[xenapi] 
xenapi_connection_url=http:// 
xenapi_connection_username= 
xenapi_connection_password= 
... 

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

[DEFAULT]
compute_driver = xenapi.XenAPIDriver
...

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# git add -A
# git commit -a -m "Add Test Compute Node 02"

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Create the first Node Group Template for Spark slave node."