Chapter 1, Designing OpenStack Cloud Architectural Consideration, revisits the main architectural core services of OpenStack and highlights various updates on each architectural design. The chapter will be a starting stage for the first logical design of OpenStack that ends with a first physical model design framed with basic calculation for storage, compute, and network services. This will help choosing the right hardware to start building a private cloud ready for production deployment.
Chapter 2, Deploying OpenStack - The DevOps Way, introduces the trend of the philosophy of DevOps and how to exploit its benefits when deploying and managing the OpenStack environment. The chapter will introduce Ansible as a chosen system management tool to automate and manage the deployment of an OpenStack environment.
A succinct overview of the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) will be taken under scope to enhance the OpenStack infrastructure management and operation. The first deployment will be based on containers for better isolation of OpenStack services and to mimic a real production setup.
Chapter 3, OpenStack Compute - Choice of Hypervisor and Node Segregation, presents deeper insights on the new updates of different services running in a cloud controller node and how to design for high availability and fault tolerant OpenStack services at an early stage. This will be covering the basic OpenStack core components, database, and message bus system. The chapter will decompose Ansible roles and playbooks in more detail for different OpenStack core components and common services.
Chapter 4, OpenStack Compute – Choice of Hypervisor and Node Segregation, covers the compute service in OpenStack and exposes the newly supported different hypervisors. A special fast growing virtualization technology supported lately by OpenStack will be introduced by covering Docker and the Magnum project. The chapter will introduce newly adopted concepts for large OpenStack setup including compute and host segregation, availability zones, regions, and the concept of cells in Nova. Compute scheduling will take a good part of the chapter by getting the grips of instance life cycle details. Ansible playbook of the compute service will be detailed to automate the installation of a new compute node in an existing OpenStack environment. The chapter will also explore few alternatives to backup an entire cluster in OpenStack.
Chapter 5, OpenStack Storage - Block, Object, and File Share, enlarges the scope of different storage types and alternatives supported by OpenStack. The chapter will give succinct updates on object and block storage in the latest releases of OpenStack. A new stable project supported by OpenStack Manilla will be covered in detail by going through its architecture layout within the OpenStack ecosystem. The chapter will explore different roles and Ansible playbooks for block and object storage, including an updated part for Ceph.
Chapter 6, Openstack Networking – Choice of Connectivity Type and Other Networking Services, focuses on presenting the current state of art in networking in OpenStack. This includes the new and updated Neutron plugins and different tunneling implementations developed in the latest OpenStack releases. The chapter describes different network implementations using Neutron. It details different network components and terminologies to simplify the management of virtual networks in OpenStack. A good part of the chapter is reserved to simplify the complexity of setting up virtual networks and routers by discovering how traffic flows under the hood. By the end of the chapter, Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) and VPN as a Service (VPNaaS) will be covered armed with examples.
Chapter 7, Advanced Networking - A Look at SDN and NFV, illustrates a new advanced networking topic in OpenStack. The chapter is dedicated to present the concepts of Software Defined Network (SDN) and NVF (Network Function Virtualization) and discuss their integration in OpenStack. The end of the chapter will explore the new implementation of Load Balancer as a Service in OpenStack.
Chapter 8, Operating the OpenStack Infrastructure – The User Perspective, discusses the usage of the readily deployed OpenStack platform. It will guide operators on how to manage users and projects and define how the underlying resources will be consumed. The chapter also gives a special insight on helping users to automate launching demanded stacks using the OpenStack orchestration service Heat. It will expose the need of adopting the concept of Infrastructure of Code and how it fulfills the new modern infrastructure requirements. As Heat will be introduced as the built-in tool to define resources from the template in OpenStack, the chapter will open the curtains for a new promising tool that supports multiple cloud providers: Terraform.
Chapter 9, OpenStack HA and Failover, speculates on the different high availability design patterns in OpenStack for each component. This will include a complete cluster setup for active and passive OpenStack services. The chapter will leverage not only the power of external tools to achieve high availability for message bus, database and other services, but will also explore the native relevant high available setups in OpenStack including network service.
Chapter 10, Monitoring and Troubleshooting - Running a Healthy OpenStack Cluster, explores the novelty of the telemetry service in OpenStack. More architectural discussions will be elaborated regarding the composition of the telemetry service within the latest releases, including alarms, events, and metrics in the ecosystem of OpenStack. It will show how to embrace the monitoring of the platform using external and popular tools such as Nagios. The chapter will help to get readers acquainted with how to diagnose common possible issues in OpenStack using different troubleshooting tools and methodologies.
Chapter 11, Keeping Track for Logs – ELK and OpenStack, goes through the available log files in OpenStack and how to use them for deep investigation when troubleshooting issues in OpenStack. The chapter will help you understand how to efficiently parse log files in OpenStack per service using modern and great log pipeline tools such as ELK (ElasticSearch, LogStash, and Kibana) stack. An updated and mature version of the ELK stack will be presented. The chapter will illustrate how to identify the root cause of the possible issues using effective ELK queries.
Chapter 12, OpenStack Benchmarking and Performance Tuning - Maintaining Cloud Performance, navigates through an advanced topic in the OpenStack journey: OpenStack performance boosting and benchmarking. By the means of one of the greatest benchmarking tools developed for OpenStack, Rally, you will gain a deeper understanding on how the OpenStack platform would behave. This would help to adjust the platform capacity and its architecture. Another novel topic will be elaborated to evaluate the OpenStack data plane. This will include benchmarking the network capabilities using Shaker tool.
