Book Image

Troubleshooting OpenStack

By : Tony Campbell
Book Image

Troubleshooting OpenStack

By: Tony Campbell

Overview of this book

OpenStack is a collection of software projects that work together to provide a cloud fabric. OpenStack is one of the fastest growing open source projects in history that unlocks cloud computing for everyone. With OpenStack, you are able to create public or private clouds on your own hardware. The flexibility and control afforded by OpenStack puts the cloud within reach of anyone willing to learn this technology. Starting with an introduction to OpenStack troubleshooting tools, we’ll walk through each OpenStack service and how you can quickly diagnose, troubleshoot, and correct problems in your OpenStack. Understanding the various projects and how they interact is essential for anyone attempting to troubleshoot an OpenStack cloud. We will start by explaining each of the major components and the dependencies between them, and move on to show you how to identify and utilize an effective set of OpenStack troubleshooting tools and fix common Keystone problems. Next, we will expose you to common errors and problems you may encounter when using the OpenStack Block Storage service (Cinder). We will then examine Heat, the OpenStack Orchestration Service, where you will learn how to trace errors, determine their root cause, and effectively correct the issue. Finally, you will get to know the best practices to architect your OpenStack cloud in order to achieve optimal performance, availability, and reliability.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Troubleshooting OpenStack
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The supporting technologies


One of the design tenants of OpenStack, since its inception, is to not reinvent the wheel. In other words, when a solid technology existed that met the needs of the project, the original developers would leverage the existing technology as opposed to creating their own version. The result is that OpenStack is built upon many technologies that administrators already know and love. The tools used to troubleshoot these technologies can also be used to troubleshoot OpenStack. In this section, we will go over a few of the supporting technologies that are commonly used across OpenStack projects. Where different projects use specific supporting technologies, they will be covered in the respective chapters for those projects.

Linux

The OpenStack software runs on Linux. The primary OpenStack services are Linux services. Rest-assured that all your experience in troubleshooting the Linux operating systems will serve you well in the world of OpenStack. You will come across OpenStack clusters running on just about every Linux distribution. Some deployments will leverage Linux networking, and experience in this area is extremely valuable in OpenStack. Many of the most popular Linux distributions offer packages to deploy OpenStack. Operators may optionally deploy from source or leverage one of the installers available in the market. Either way, Linux is critical to any OpenStack deployment, and we will make use of many common Linux tools when troubleshooting.

Databases

Most OpenStack services are backed by a database. The Oslo project in OpenStack provides common Python code for OpenStack projects that need to access a database. Oslo provides libraries to connect to a Postgres or MySQL database. Experience with these database engines, and others like them, is very useful when troubleshooting. As you understand the different projects and what they store in the database, you can trace a request to ensure that the state recorded in the database matches the state reported elsewhere.

Message queue

OpenStack often leverages a message broker to facilitate communication between its components. To avoid tight coupling, most components do not communicate directly with one another, but instead communication is routed through a message broker. With the message broker playing a central role in component communication, it is a powerful resource for the troubleshooter. It is possible to trace messages from one component to another and spot messages that may not be generated or delivered. This information can help lead you down the right path when attempting to isolate an issue.

The Apache web server

OpenStack projects have begun to use Web Server Gate Interface (WSGI) servers to deploy their APIs. The Apache web server is a popular choice to handle these WSGI applications. Apache troubleshooting tools and techniques are directly transferable when working with OpenStack.