Book Image

OpenStack Administration with Ansible

By : Walter Bentley
Book Image

OpenStack Administration with Ansible

By: Walter Bentley

Overview of this book

Most organizations are seeking methods to improve business agility because they have realized just having a cloud is not enough. Being able to improve application deployments, reduce infrastructure downtime, and eliminate daily manual tasks can only be accomplished through some sort of automation. Packed with real-world OpenStack administrative tasks, this book will walk you through working examples and explain how these tasks can be automated using one of the most popular open source automation tools—Ansible. We will start with a brief overview of OpenStack and Ansible and highlight some best practices. Each chapter will provide an introduction to handling various Cloud Operator administration tasks such as creating multiple users/tenants, setting up Multi-Tenant Isolation, customizing your clouds quotas, taking instance snapshots, evacuating compute hosts for maintenance, and running cloud health checks, and a step-by-step tutorial on how to automate these tasks with Ansible.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
OpenStack Administration with Ansible
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Define backups and snapshots


From an OpenStack perspective, there are distinct differences between a backup and a snapshot of an instance. Those differences could influence the use of each of those functions. Note that keeping with true cloud behavior, all cloud resources are meant to be disposable. You may ask, what does that statement really mean? It simply means that any instance or volume (resource) created to support your application function should be able to be recreated in some sort of automated fashion. Instilling the pets versus cattle analogy. It is no longer the days of attempting to bring a sick VM back to life; the need of the hour is to destroy the instance, recreate it and off you go again. These principles remove the want for instance backups. With that said, there will be cases when you may want to have a backup of an instance. So, let's first examine the capability of taking an instance backup.

The OpenStack compute service (Nova) functionality of backing up an instance...