Book Image

OpenStack for Architects - Second Edition

By : Michael Solberg, Ben Silverman
Book Image

OpenStack for Architects - Second Edition

By: Michael Solberg, Ben Silverman

Overview of this book

Over the past six years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, including industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders, such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE, has led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Due to its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill set to design and implement it. OpenStack for Architects leads you through the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. This book will address the recent changes made in the latest OpenStack release i.e Queens, and will also deal with advanced concepts such as containerization, NVF, and security. At each point, the authors offer you advice based on the experience they'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, the book focuses on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Software vulnerabilities


OpenStack is an orchestration platform written mostly in Python and runs on top of Linux-based operating systems. This orchestration platform is responsible for provisioning instances or Infrastructure as a Service to tenants in support of workloads that are required to run in a cloud environment. Therefore, OpenStack software vulnerabilities can be broken down into two main groups. The first group consists of containers, instances, or bare metal servers that OpenStack provisions and orchestrates; the second group consists of the OpenStack infrastructure environment and its hosts.

Instance software security and patching

Under OpenStack, the hypervisor creates and runs independent virtual machines or instances. These instances require software updates and patching separate from the underlying OpenStack infrastructure on which it resides. Updates to the hypervisor and underlying server operating systems do not propagate up to the active workloads and instances; therefore...