Provisioning the OpenStack environment
One of the tasks that is going to be the simplest and, at the same time, the hardest when you need to create your first OpenStack configuration is going to be provisioning. There are basically two ways you can go with this: one is to install services one at a time in a carefully prepared hardware configuration, while the other is to just use a single server install guide from the OpenStack site and create a single machine that will serve as your test bed. In this chapter, everything we do is created in such an instance, but before we learn how to install the system, we need to understand the differences.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system, and its main idea is to enable us to use multiple servers and other devices to create a coherent, easily configured cloud that can be managed from a central point, either through an API or through a web server. The size and type of the OpenStack deployment can be from one server running everything, to...