It might be confusing to understand the state of the art of innovation when it comes to OpenStack software offerings. The rise of this open source project has been unique since its birth 14 years ago. Through its different releases, the OpenStack community has kept developing what a private cloud solution can offer based on ongoing technology trends. When the first releases of Kubernetes (container orchestration technology) were made public, subsequent OpenStack releases quickly dedicated a cycle to include services around the OpenStack ecosystem that would facilitate container management out of the box. One of the OpenStack success stories is undoubtedly its vision of staying one step ahead. There is a clear reason why OpenStack remains the fourth largest open source community worldwide: trust in its main core services. Since the first days of OpenStack, mid and large enterprises have invested and keep contributing to its software to boost...

The OpenStack project has been launched to solve the IaaS paradigm. By adopting the pay-as-you-use model, underlying resources, including compute, networking, and storage, are exposed as pools and reserved on demand securely per the user’s request. Throughout the development of the OpenStack ecosystem (considered in other literature as the cloud operating system), more open source projects have joined the emerging cloud software life cycle to extend its capabilities. As mentioned previously, the secret sauce of such project development comes from the natural API design, which consistently facilitates communication between services. The versatile number of services could sidetrack newcomers in understanding where and how fundamental parts of the ecosystem work to enable a well-designed architecture for custom needs and requirements. The following sections will iterate through what are considered the core services of OpenStack...

Before building a picture of your future OpenStack environment, it is necessary to have business goals that align with the outcome of the OpenStack solution. As we have seen briefly in the previous sections with the latest updates in the OpenStack glossary, you might feel how overwhelming it could be with newly developed services and features. Obviously, the new image of OpenStack looks more robust than ever, with many hands of Anything as a Service (XaaS) opportunities. The array of choices might prevent architects and operators from starting a proper OpenStack infrastructure exercise if the scope of your business is not defined from the first day of drafting the design. As with existing major public providers such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, the OpenStack deployment should be considered as a way of investment in the long run. Expecting operational and cost savings can be felt only at later stages. Being strategic is essential to take advantage of the OpenStack...

Independent of which use case your future OpenStack deployment will start with, mastering the art of its ecosystem is a vital step before investigating any further design and architecture options. OpenStack covers more than 1 million lines of Python code! At this stage, there is no need to worry about learning how the code works: far more important is to take a reverse engineering approach: understanding the ecosystem interactions. Simply understanding the interrelation of core services gives you the keys to the kingdom of the art of design. Starting with the basics, the foundational components will open more doors to the next ones if we master the core ones correctly. So far, we have revisited core services of OpenStack that exist with each release and had a brief scan of the incubated projects, particularly within the latest releases. Next, we will select a common workflow that illustrates the different steps and pieces to spawn a VM. This type of workflow will...

Identifying the initial use case of your OpenStack environment is a major key to a successful start of the cloud journey. With a vast array of features, especially within the latest releases, the cloud management platform has become more mature than ever, but that might be overwhelming. Sidetracking the purpose of your OpenStack implementation would increase management complexity and potentially put your business at risk if such investment is not carefully accompanied by a vision. For this purpose, drafting your design into different iterations will help you avoid being blocked by the paradox of choices and unleash a clear short-term vision toward the longer one. As the first design iteration, we will simply identify our conceptual OpenStack model, followed by the logical architecture. Once drafted, we will walk through the practical implementation and put some numbers together to reflect our first deployment picture in the hardware.

Drafting the conceptual...

Being strategic is a fundamental key to making the right decisions when it comes to how to architect a complex ecosystem such as OpenStack. This chapter should lower the entry barrier to start an effective plan that meets your organization’s needs. The approach taken should help you identify different stages to start your cloud journey. There is no exact rule of thumb on how to design an operational OpenStack environment but templating the design patterns for each core service and sticking to the initially collected requirements will definitely enhance the journey. This chapter went through the newest updates on core services in the OpenStack ecosystem within Antelope and later releases, and a few more projects were considered to be offered once the private cloud is up and running. From an architecture perspective, this chapter should be revisited during the next stages to align and update your design draft in each step. As we used an iterative and incremental approach...