OpenStack is a set of software tools and packages used to build private and hybrid cloud computing platforms. It is one of the most popular and widely adopted open source software managed by OpenStack Foundation. Since its introduction in 2010, a huge number of reputed industries, including Red Hat, Intel, HP, IBM, AMD, Canonical, and many others, support OpenStack.
The most promising feature of OpenStack is that it provides a DIY( Do-It-Yourself) approach to cloud computing, and it can easily embrace the new development features. Therefore, companies such as Google and Facebook created their own data storage and cloud services using OpenStack.
High availability typically means achieving 99.99% availability, and basically this can be possible by removing all single point of failure (SPOF), which is also applicable for OpenStack. This book covers all the basic and advance approaches related to achieving high availability in OpenStack with detailed step-by-step explanations, hands-on exercises, and screenshots. These provide you with a real-time practical understanding of implementing high availability in OpenStack. Some customer case studies are also included:
http://www.colocationamerica.com/blog/core-advantages-open-stack-for-iaas.htm.
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/openstack-costs-benefits,2-684-2.html.
Chapter 1, An Introduction to High Availability Concepts, introduces the reader to a basic understanding of high availability in a production environment. The requirements and common design patterns will be explained in details; architectural choices to maximize availability have been critically discussed.
Chapter 2, Database and Messaging Services, explains how to obtain resilient and available OpenStack supporting services, such as database (MariaDB with Galera clustering) and RabbitMQ with replicated queues.
Chapter 3, Load Balancing for Active/Active Services, delves in to the the basic and advanced topics of network load balancing and explains with detailed examples, the configurations of HAProxy and keepalived.
Chapter4, Clustering, Fencing, and Active/Passive Services, describe the services in OpenStack that are still not fully stateless, and thus require classical clustering methods such as Pacemaker. This chapter will analyze in depth the construction of a cluster of services with their resource agents and dependencies.
Chapter 5, Highly Available OpenStack Services, deals with the scaling and resiliency of all the basic OpenStack services: compute, image, storage, object storage, and dashboard.
Chapter 6, Distributed Networking, delves into the details of Neutron Distributed Virtual Routers, multiple L3 agents in active/passive configuration, and third-party networking drivers that offer high availability options. The OpenStack Networking services are the most difficult to scale and render highly available.
Chapter 7, Shared Storage, describes how shared storage is a fundamental requirement for high availability and for a quick recovery from a failure (evacuating failed nodes with live migration). This chapter presents different options to provide shared storage to OpenStack and explains their configuration and setup to some extent.
Chapter 8, Failure Scenario and Disaster Recovery, focuses on how for any OpenStack operator who strives to bring the cloud they manage to higher availability, understanding the different ways that a failure can occur and how these can impact the performance and availability of the service is a fundamental skill. This chapter analyzes different failure scenarios and proposes solutions to provide a swift and effective recovery to a normal operational level.
Chapter 9, The Principles of Design for Highly Available Applications, explains how having a highly available cloud might not be enough, if the application running on top of it doesn't take advantage of the principles and concepts of a resilient design. This chapter mainly explains how correct application design can help improve reliability and uptime of end user services; particular focus has been dedicated to microservice architectures and distributed web applications.
Chapter 10, Monitoring for High Availability, covers how the control and maintenance of a cloud is of the utmost importance; visibility in operations and alerting on failures are the basis for correct functioning and quick recovery in case of unexpected outages or planned maintenance windows. The chapter introduces a few key concepts and tools to correctly measure and control the operations of an OpenStack cloud.
Chapter 11, Use Cases and Real-World Examples, covers a number of real-world examples of HA deployments. The relevant lessons for a design of similar resilient clouds have been distilled and are presented to the reader
This book assumes that you are aware of the fundamental concepts of cloud computing and high performance computing.
A basic understanding of Linux administration and commands are beneficial here.
A hands-on experience of the installation of different software or packages on a Linux-based OS is essential to the installation of OpenStack's packages and to execute various commands.
The approach adopted in this book uses OpenStack 2014.1 (Icehouse) version, which requires at least a 700 MHz processor (Intel Celeron or better), 8GB RAM (system memory), and 120GB of hard-drive space. The preferred OS is Ubuntu 12.04 and higher.
Furthermore, you will need an Internet access to download the software packages that you do not already have.
This book is for OpenStack administrator, cloud administrator, cloud engineer, or cloud developer with some real time understanding of cloud computing, OpenStack and familiarity with Linux command is essential to start with this book.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
primitive p_ip_mysqlocf:heartbeat:IPaddr2 \ paramsip="192.168.1.32" cidr_netmask="24" \ op monitor interval="30s"
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Sudo rabbitmqctl cluster status
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The default value of the ENABLED attribute value is changed to 1."
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