Chapter 1. Introducing OpenStack
At the Vancouver OpenStack Conference in May 2015, US retail giant Walmart announced that they had deployed an OpenStack cloud with 140,000 cores of compute supporting 1.5 billion page views on Cyber Monday. CERN, a long-time OpenStack user, announced that their OpenStack private cloud had grown to 100,000 cores running computational workloads on two petabytes of disk in production. Another 250 companies and organizations across nine industry verticals have announced that they have adopted OpenStack in their data centers.
OpenStack had completely redrawn the private cloud landscape in the five short years of its existence. In this chapter, we'll look at what OpenStack is and why it has been so influential. We'll also take the first steps in architecting a cloud.