PISTON CLOUDOS WITH OPENSTACK: TURN-KEY WEB-SCALE INFRASTRUCTURE SOFTWARE. Easy. CloudOS Compendium TECHNICAL WHITEPAPER

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PISTON CLOUD COMPUTING, INC. | WWW.PISTONCLOUD.COM | +1 (800) 890-4965

PISTON CLOUDOS

WITH OPENSTACK:

TURN-KEY

WEB-SCALE

INFRASTRUCTURE

SOFTWARE

This primer will introduce you to Piston CloudOS™ with OpenStack™, a software solution that frees agile software development teams from the high cost, long deployment times, and overwhelming complexity associated with building and managing a private cloud environment. Piston enables agile development teams to quickly deploy scalable, production- ready private cloud environments on converged commodity hardware. Companies building web, mobile, and big data

applications use Piston CloudOS with OpenStack to automate their IT operations and bring new products to market faster.

Piston CloudOS includes everything needed to boot, manage, and scale a complete Infrastructure-as-a-Service environment.

Unlike traditional on-premise solutions, Piston CloudOS with OpenStack is so easy to deploy and manage that your complete private cloud can be built in a single day, requires virtually no ongoing operations support, and can be linearly scaled whenever you need additional capacity. Piston improves datacenter

efficiency by managing a group of servers as a single pool of elastic and scalable computing resources. Delivering compute, storage, networking, and management through self-service interfaces and APIs, Piston includes a hyper-converged hardware architecture, a highly secure stateless Linux Micro-OS, and advanced cluster management technology.

Easy

CloudOS eliminates the lengthy install process of booting and loading the host operating systems onto the individual servers and makes it easy for IT right from the start. When the time comes to add more capacity to the cloud, scaling out is simple:

attach servers to the network, and CloudOS automatically adds

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them to the cloud with zero downtime or impact to running services or workloads. The same is true for scaling -in and

removing servers, CloudOS handles the whole process seamlessly and within minutes.

Flexibility

Piston CloudOS can be deployed on your choice of commodity servers from almost any major x86 vendor, and scales to tens of thousands of physical servers. CloudOS makes deployment of either single or multiple services such as Hadoop, OpenStack or Containers, extremely easy. From the graphical interface or APIs provided by the Distributed Cloud Manager component, you can not only choose which services to use, but also choose the infrastructure components for authentication, SDN or data- structure management.

Assurance

Piston CloudOS brings unprecedented robustness to the software-defined datacenter, as well as continuous delivery and peace of mind. It is a proven infrastructure software perfected

over four years, with customer validation at scale with 100s of customer deployments and millions of VMs. This technical brief examines the six layers on which Piston CloudOS is built.

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Six Layers of Piston CloudOS

Piston CloudOS makes the hyper-converged hyper-

commodity datacenter easy for agile IT. Piston CloudOS is

a complete operating system for your datacenter since it

includes all the necessary elements, including host OS, Boot

Code and resource manager, that you need to run cluster

infrastructure.

1. Distributed Cloud Services - a master election approach

that ensures high-availability for global-scale distributed

systems

2. Distributed Cloud Manager - a simple way to manage

and monitor the infrastructure through APIs or elegant

dashboards.

3. Cloud Fabric - a robust fabric for your infrastructure

4. Iocane Linux Micro-OS - a hardened, minimal Linux

operating system that boots into a RAM disk

5. CloudBoot - the hardware provisioning and orchestration

framework. Has advanced auto-discovery and configuration

of servers.

CloudBoot Iocane Linux

Cloud Fabric (Compute, Storage, Network) Distributed Cloud Manager

Distributed Cloud Services

™ ® ®

Kubernetes^® Mesos^™

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With Piston’s API and UI, operators manage and monitor the cloud as one entity and not individual machines. Among other things, Piston’s advanced cluster management software enables a fully automated rolling upgrade without any service disruption.

For advanced troubleshooting, Piston allows for an encrypted phone-home service, so there’s no wait time for support or endless hours of hold music. Piston’s zero-downtime update service supports both online and near-line upgrades. When an upgrade is available with the latest patches, you can rest assured that it will be successfully delivered to your Piston CloudOS environment with zero downtime. Piston’s advanced cluster

management software enables all nodes in your cluster to be updated in a fully-automated rollover process without causing any service disruption. Your connection to the Piston update service is encrypted with your unique license entitlement key.

Options for updates to airgapped installations are also available.

DISTRIBUTED CLOUD

SERVICES

ENSURING

HIGH-AVAILABILITY

Most infrastructure services can run on every server, but some components need to run a single instance at guaranteed locations. Typical configuration management addresses this by using a single “master” server configuration profile. Piston CloudOS uses a master election approach to ensure high availability. Any one of the nodes in your cluster can be elected to operate services. If the process, the network connection, or the hardware in that node fails, the service is seamlessly re-elected to run on another node.

DISTRIBUTED CLOUD

MANAGER

A SIMPLE WAY TO

MANAGE AND MONITOR

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

THROUGH APIS OR ELEGANT

DASHBOARDS

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7 CLOUD FABRIC

POWERFUL AND RELIABLE

FOUNDATION

Piston CloudOS includes Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Networking (SDN), and a KVM compute fabric. This provides a default and robust fabric for your cloud infrastructure. With the ability to use optional storage back- ends, network plugins, virtual machines, and containers, Piston CloudOS allows you to add to the default configuration. This layer abstracts the underlying commodity distributed hardware servers including its storage and networking components into a converged software defined datacenter.

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With Piston’s Hyper-Converged Architecture, compute, storage, network, and management runs on every cloud node. A hyper- converged architecture provides elastic scaling of resources and fault tolerance.

Fungibility

As any datacenter operator can tell you, over the lifetime of any server, the operating costs (including power, cooling, and maintenance) will be about twice the initial capital cost. By embracing a hyper-converged architecture, every server in your datacenter becomes fungible. The RAM, CPU cores, network bandwidth, and storage space of every single box becomes part of a shared resource pool, delivered through a single unified logical interface, the Piston dashboard and APIs.

Maintainability

Google was one of the pioneers of the “lights-out” datacenter model. By embracing a “next business day” support model for their hardware resources, they forced themselves to develop a distributed system’s approach to infrastructure services

and applications. When individual servers aren’t important, their components aren’t important either, which means that a Hyper-Converged Architecture can take advantage of single power supplies, single network cards, and cheaper commodity hard drives. The cost savings derived from using commodity servers from an entire ecosystem of vendors continue to add up. When every node in your cluster is just dumb hardware, the only maintenance action required by a human is to power off and remove a failed node and rack a fresh one. There’s no OS configuration, no “spare kit,” no switch configuration, and no logging in to a CMDB and entering MAC addresses. You don’t even need to manually turn it on.

Combats the Mobility

Gap

The gap between our ability to move data, and our ability to produce and store it, is called the “mobility gap,” and it’s getting dramatically worse over time. A Hyper-Converged Architecture is one of the only ways to combat the mobility gap. They

maximize the total bisectional bandwidth to every available spindle. A comparable traditional architecture for a private cloud

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might provision a single NAS filer for each rack. If these filers were provisioned with dual 40Gb NICs (and assuming the top- of-rack switch had additional 40Gb ports available), this rack of servers would have a total of 80Gb of bandwidth addressing that storage. But by using only single 10Gb NICs in each server, that same rack of servers would have a total of 210Gb of bandwidth addressing the storage fabric – almost three times as much.

IOCANE MICRO-OS

NO SOFTWARE DIVERGENCE

Iocane Linux™ Micro-OS is a hardened Linux operating system.

It’s minimal (just a few hundred packages), which reduces the security footprint of your entire system. It includes only what’s required to run Piston CloudOS, eliminating many of the installation and version management headaches present in traditional individual-server focused operating systems. It can be characterized as a bare-metal operating system that is tailor- made for pools of hyper-converged, commodity resources. Shell prompt access to the physical servers is never required for cluster

administration. Easy to use dashboards are the command prompt of your CloudOS environment. It’s also transient because it boots off of the network into a RAM disk, it’s never installed to disk. So an Iocane Linux upgrade is always a reboot, never a patch. When implemented properly, a micro-OS can provide many of the same security benefits as a hardware appliance, but without the additional lock-in.

BUILT ON LINUX

The current version of Iocane Linux is built on the 3.10.31 Linux kernel. It provides containers, network namespaces, resource limiting and network traffic shaping throughout Piston CloudOS.

And because it can guarantee that there are no processes running in the OS that aren’t managed by Piston, we can orchestrate otherwise destructive system functions (such as formatting and partitioning drives or powering off physical equipment) without risk.

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11 What’s in a Name?

And yes, in case you were wondering, the name “Iocane” comes from the cult classic 1987 movie “The Princess Bride”. In the movie, Iocane powder is an odorless, colorless, and tasteless substance. Piston’s Iocane Micro-OS is an expression of that philosophy – it’s a server operating system that is intended to serve

transparently as a platform for running distributed services.

Quite literally, it’s an OS that you can’t log into. And we think that’s a very good thing.

CLOUDBOOT

FROM BARE METAL TO HIGHLY-

AVAILABLE CLOUD

INFRASTRUCTURE IN UNDER

10 MINUTES

CloudBoot is Piston’s hardware provisioning and orchestration framework. CloudBoot takes hyper-converged servers from baremetal to a highly-available cloud infrastructure in roughly 10 minutes. Using a single configuration policy, CloudBoot enables auto-discovery and configuration of the servers, profiling of the hardware, and booting of Iocane Linux. When the need arises to add more capacity to the cloud, scaling out is simple: attach servers to the network, and CloudBoot automatically adds them to the cloud with zero downtime or impact to running services or

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workloads.

24x7 CUSTOMER

SUPPORT: We’ve got

you covered

ADVANCED TECHNICAL

SUPPORT

Every Piston CloudOS software license comes with 24×7

technical support. Piston also offers an additional level of support for CloudOS™ customers deploying and managing OpenStack.

Our Customer Support team includes key members of the original NASA and Rackspace research teams that founded OpenStack, as well as experienced cloud architects and operators.

AROUND-THE-CLOCK

Whether you’re calling from Boston or Beijing, our Customer

Support team is on hand 24 hours a day, every day (including holidays and weekends) to troubleshoot your issues and get your questions answered fast. From your first installation and through every cluster expansion, Piston has your back.

CONTACT SUPPORT

Our advanced technical customer support team can be reached by logging into the support portal below, emailing support@

pistoncloud.com, or calling +1-888-737-1104.

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13 About Piston Cloud

Computing, Inc.

Founded in 2011, Piston makes CloudOS™, a new type of

operating system that enables agile development teams to quickly deploy new services, frameworks and orchestration tools on commodity hardware, without wrestling with infrastructure plumbing. Perfected through years of OpenStack® deployments at hundreds of companies, Piston CloudOS makes bare metal orchestration and cluster management an afterthought, empowering IT to deploy new services in minutes, reduce

operational and management costs by 85%, and provide visibility into critical resources.

Customers like Swisscom, King Digital Entertainment,

Intelemage, Radio Free Asia, and Zulily use Piston CloudOS™ to automate their IT operations and bring new products to market faster.

The company is headquartered in San Francisco and funded by True Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures, Cisco Systems, Inc., Data Collective, and Divergent Ventures.

Next Steps

▶ Get started with Piston CloudOS at pistoncloud.com/

start

▶ Get in touch with us at [email protected]