Book Image

OpenStack for Architects

By : Michael Solberg, Benjamin Silverman
Book Image

OpenStack for Architects

By: Michael Solberg, Benjamin Silverman

Overview of this book

Over the last five years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders such as Red Hat have led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Because of its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill-set to design and implement it. This guide leads you through each of the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. At each point, we offer you advice based on the experience we'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, we focus on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
OpenStack for Architects
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Security zones within OpenStack


Within an OpenStack deployment exists a series of logical security zones. These are the basic areas of trust within the OpenStack platform that can be leveraged by applications, servers, networks, or users. These zones have an increasing level of trust and can be broken down into the following zones:

  1. Public

  2. Guest

  3. Management

  4. Data

  • Public zones: These zones within OpenStack are an entirely untrusted area of any cloud infrastructure. By convention, they are the most open and are thus called public. They are not necessarily open to the Internet, but the area is open to being consumed by untrusted resources and on networks without the operators direct authority. This area requires encryption and other compensating controls in order to meet the security requirements of most organizations.

  • Guest zones: These zones are for instances that are provisioned within the OpenStack cloud. They include inter-tenant network instance traffic (one instance to another across segregated...