What is OpenStack?

OpenStack is best defined by its use cases, as users and contributors approach the software with many different goals in mind. For hosting providers such as Rackspace, OpenStack provides the infrastructure for a multitenant shared services platform. For others, it might provide a mechanism for provisioning data and compute for a distributed business intelligence application. There are a few answers to this question that are relevant regardless of your organization's use case.

OpenStack is an API

One of the initial goals of OpenStack was to provide Application Program Interface (API) compatibility with the Amazon Web Service. As of the November 2014 user survey, 44% of production deployments were still using the EC2 Compatibility API to interact with the system. As the popularity of the platform has increased, the OpenStack API has become a de facto standard on its own. As such, many of the enterprise organizations that we've worked with to create OpenStack clouds are using them as an underlying Infrastructure as a Service layer for one or more Platform as a Service or Hybrid Cloud deployments.

Every feature or function of OpenStack is exposed in one of its REST APIs. There are command-line interfaces for OpenStack (legacy nova and the newer openstack common client) as well as a standard web interface (Horizon). However, most interactions between the components and end users happen over the API. This is advantageous for the following reasons:

• Everything in the system can be automated
• Integration with other systems is well defined
• Use cases can be clearly defined and automatically tested

Note

The APIs are well defined and versioned REST APIs, and there are native clients and SDKs for more than a dozen programming languages. For a full list of current SDKs, refer to http://api.openstack.org.

OpenStack - an open source software project

OpenStack is an open source software project which has a huge number of contributors from a wide range of organizations. OpenStack was originally created by NASA and Rackspace. Rackspace is still a significant contributor to OpenStack, but these days contributions to the project come from a wide array of companies, including the traditional open source contributors (Red Hat, IBM, and HP) as well as companies which are dedicated entirely to OpenStack (Mirantis, and CloudBase). Contributions come in the form of drivers for particular pieces of infrastructure (that is, Cinder block storage drivers or Neutron SDN drivers), bug fixes, or new features in the core projects.

OpenStack is governed by a foundation. Membership in the foundation is free and open to anyone who wishes to join. There are currently thousands of members in the foundation. Leadership on technical issues is provided by a thirteen-member technical committee, which is generally elected by the individual members. Strategic and financial issues are decided by a board of directors, which includes members appointed by corporate sponsors and elected by the individual members.

Note

For more information on joining or contributing to the OpenStack Foundation, refer to http://www.openstack.org/foundation.

OpenStack is written in the Python programming language and is usually deployed on the Linux operating system. The source code is readily available on the Internet and commits are welcome from the community at large. Before code is committed to the project, it has to pass through a series of gates, which include unit testing and code review.

Note

For more information on committing code to OpenStack, refer to https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/How_To_Contribute.

OpenStack - a private cloud platform

Finally, OpenStack provides the software modules necessary to build an automated private cloud platform. While OpenStack has traditionally been focused on providing Infrastructure as a Service capabilities in the style of Amazon Web Services, new projects have been introduced lately, which begin to provide capabilities which might be associated more with Platform as a Service. This book will focus on implementing the core set of OpenStack components described as follows.

The most important aspect of OpenStack pertaining to its usage as a private cloud platform is the tenant model. The authentication and authorization services which provide this model are implemented in the Identity service, Keystone. Every virtual or physical object governed by the OpenStack system exists within a private space referred to as a tenant or project. The latest version of the Keystone API has differentiated itself further to include a higher level construct called a domain. Regardless of the terminology, the innate ability to securely segregate compute, network, and storage resources is the most fundamental capability of the platform. This is what differentiates it from traditional data center virtualization and makes it a private cloud platform.