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

Dealing with Infrastructure as a Software


A Vice President of Infrastructure at a large company once told us something like this, I like hardware. My hardware hardly ever breaks. The software I deploy breaks all the time. When my data center becomes software, how will I ever have a stable platform? Although the same concern could (and probably should) have once been applied to virtualization, most organizations today are very comfortable with the idea of software pretending to be hardware. The software-defined data center is something a little more intimidating though. Although we've had software pretending to be a CPU for a long time, we've only had software pretending to be a storage array relatively recently. Also, when the storage array goes down, everything tends to come down with it.

However, maybe the bigger question is around software constantly breaking on deployment. Indeed, the most successful OpenStack deployments that we've worked with have all adopted modern software development...