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

Chapter 2. Architecting the Cloud

The array of possible hardware and software combinations that can be used to create an OpenStack cloud is pretty amazing at this point. A phrase we typically hear these days is that having an integration for OpenStack is table stakes for a hardware or software product coming in the market. As of the Queens release of OpenStack (March 2018), there were 75 Cinder storage drivers and over 40 Neutron network plugins. These integrations cover a wide range of products from traditional EMC storage arrays and Cisco switches to various software-defined storage and networking products. OpenStack supports a number of hypervisors and compute platforms, ranging from commodity x86 hardware to IBM Z-series mainframes.

A few of the decisions we make as architects affect the bottom line as much as hardware and software selection. Although we approach the deployment of our cloud or the development of our software in an iterative fashion to reduce the risk of mistakes, it is...