How To Use Openstack (And Piston) For Your Cloud Computing

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

IN MANY OF OUR

CONVERSATIONS

WITH CUSTOMERS

AND PROSPECTS, WE

HAVE DISCOVERED

AN INTERESTING

INFORMATION GAP.

Most business unit owners already understand the benefits that they ought to be getting from their private cloud project (increased agility, reduced operational expenditure, improved overall IT security, etc.). But while we’ve spent time explaining the benefits of private cloud, we haven’t spent much time describing the specific IT services that OpenStack® (and Piston) provide. Consider this a primer.

Overview

The technology behind OpenStack compute was first used at NASA, to power the private cloud that hosted applications for NASA’s partnerships with the White House (USASpending.gov), Microsoft (WorldWide Telescope), and Google (Google Mars).

It now also powers the Rackspace® Cloud, HP® Cloud and IBM®

cloud, as well as hundreds of other public and private clouds for tens of thousands of users. It was first released as open source in May of 2010, under an Apache License.

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3 GOVERNED BY THE

OPENSTACK FOUNDATION

The OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity, was established in September 2012 to manage the OpenStack project and fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud platform. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has more than 15,000 individual members from more than 135 countries and 850 different organizations. The OpenStack Foundation promotes the development, distribution, and adoption of the OpenStack cloud framework.

The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to grow the footprint of public and private OpenStack clouds, enable technology vendors targeting the platform, and assist developers in producing the best cloud software in the industry. Like the software, individual membership within the OpenStack Foundation is free and accessible to anyone.

Its Platinum, Gold, and Corporate Sponsors also support the Foundation via both financial and code contributions.

The OpenStack

Foundation has three

separate governance bodies:

1. THE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE MEMBERS define and steward the technical direction of

OpenStack software, including cross-program issues.

The committee of 13 is elected by the community’s active technical contributors.

2. THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS provides strategic and financial oversight of foundation resources and staff, and manages the trademark and brand policy.

3. THE USER COMMITTEE represents a broad set of enterprise, academic, and service provider users to the technical committee and board of directors.

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HUNDREDS OF COMMUNITY

MEMBERS

With more than 200 companies and 2,000+ developers

contributing to the code, OpenStack is the result of the world’s brightest minds and companies working together to meet the world’s cloud computing needs.

The OpenStack community is a loose coalition of enterprise-level companies partnered to meet their development needs. Some of the largest companies in IT run public cloud services (HP, Rackspace, Dreamhost, and IBM), powered by OpenStack. New OpenStack private clouds are coming online across the globe daily. If interoperability is important, OpenStack is important.

Development is driven by the needs of hundreds of enterprise and research organizations, so OpenStack doesn’t play favorites.

This ensures your organization isn’t locked into a proprietary architecture. OpenStack has a well-defined, standard interface that gives you portability across hardware and software vendors.

Your applications can move from behind-the-firewall private cloud deployments, to public clouds across the world.

In November of 2013, during the OpenStack Ice House Summit in Hong Kong, the DefCore committee was formed to clarify how the OpenStack brand is applied to commercial uses. OpenStack’s DefCore committee is charged with defining and promulgating what is actually the “OpenStack Core” and also helps with compatibility clarity. The scope will likely expand since brand is an ongoing concern related to specialized marks and other use cases.

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5 OPENSTACK RELEASE HISTORY

The OpenStack community collaborates around a six-month, time-based release cycle, with frequent development milestones.

Most commercial products use stable branches of older releases as the basis for their solutions.

VERSIONS & RELEASE DATES

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Understanding

OpenStack: A

Framework for

Infrastructure Cloud

with Interfaces

Written primarily in Python, OpenStack is an open source, infrastructure-as-a-service framework. In this context,

“infrastructure” means an abstraction from physical resources on a per-server basis, to logical resources allocated out of aggregated resource pools. The three kinds of infrastructure in core OpenStack are:

• Storage (Swift and Cinder)

• Compute (Nova and Glance)

• Networking (Nova-net and Neutron)

Allocation out of these pools of compute, storage, and networking resources is managed through a self-service web

dashboard and a set of command line tools, or via the native OpenStack APIs.

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Starting a virtual server in the OpenStack world begins with the selection of a base disk image from which to boot. Most enterprises will supply a set of patched and approved base images with an operating system and perhaps a limited number of applications. From here, a DevOps¹ user will typically take one of two paths: either customize this image, installing the applications they need for their project, and then make a new image out of it; or use a configuration management tool to perform such an install and configuration after the virtual machine is started.

When your virtual server is launched, the disk image is cloned from the image registry, onto your shared storage. This means that changes to your virtual server do not automatically change the base image it was launched from. It also means that you can

1 DevOps (a contraction of development- operations) is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration, and integration between software development (application/ software engineering) and IT operations (systems administration/infrastructure) professionals.

launch thousands of instances from a single disk image — and customize them using one of the two methods described above.

With more complex n-tier applications, the runtime

configuration of these many instances (so that all of your app servers are aware of, and able to connect to, all of your database servers, for instance) is often managed using an orchestration tool. These days, clever DevOps engineers may do this using their configuration management tool directly.

In order to manage the network access to these instances, there are a set of APIs and services that interconnect the OpenStack Compute service with OpenStack Networking.

COMPUTE:

Let a thousand flowers

boot

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In order to really take advantage of the elasticity of your cloud environment, it’s best to treat the storage of your application’s data as separate from the running compute instances. Which brings us to the next couple of services: volumes and object storage.

Object Storage

By now, most people who work in IT are familiar with S3, Amazon’s pioneering object storage system. By giving up posix semantics (for example, those software layers that make storage look “attached” to a particular machine, and in particular allow programs to map such storage directly to memory), Amazon was able to build an incredibly scalable, incredibly reliable storage infrastructure that spans the entire globe. And that’s what you get with OpenStack — near-infinite scale-out storage of data objects, or ‘blobs’.

Block Storage

The OpenStack volumes service delivers much the same benefits that you would get out of a traditional NAS or SAN filer — a block devices that can be attached to your running virtual server via iSCSI or another standard storage protocol. Unlike a NAS or SAN device, however, OpenStack volumes are provisioned from a self-service API, and can be programmatically attached or detached. It’s software-defined block storage.

STORAGE:

Better, faster, stronger,

cost-efficient-er

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Easily the most complex of the OpenStack services, OpenStack networking is nonetheless a powerful and critical tool in your cloud arsenal. It allows you to provision arbitrary Layer 2 and Layer 3 virtual networks and secure those networks with a sophisticated set of firewall rules. The good news is that, at least in popular OpenStack distributions, the basics work right out of the box. Each tenant defined in your authentication system is allocated a virtual network, and your virtual servers and volumes are assigned IP addresses within that network, typically using a DHCP server that’s also managed by OpenStack Network. But it’s also possible to attach additional network interfaces to your virtual servers, to statically assign IPs using privileged guest agents within your virtual machines, and to isolate and secure your projects with 802.1Q-based VLANs or PVLANs.

Best practices in networking are cautioned here. Liberally apply the KISS principle. Start by mapping your private cloud environment to your existing network policies and move forward slowly from there. Its revolutionary technology, but an evolutionary approach can save you trouble in the long run. Also,

make sure that the features you plan on using within OpenStack are supported by your networking hardware and your chosen SDN solution.

NETWORKING:

SDN of awesome!

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While most of OpenStack’s true power is under the hood (you can’t imagine how exciting it is to watch virtual machines springing into existence based on the network or CPU load of your application), a straightforward user and admin dashboard makes it easy to get up-and-running quickly. The dashboard is just one way to interact with OpenStack resources. Developers can automate access or build tools to manage their resources using the native OpenStack API or one of a number of compatibility APIs (including EC2 and GCE).

The OpenStack services, when implemented together, provide an incredibly flexible self-service infrastructure platform. They are the low-level building blocks of any scalable cloud offering.

In order to get comfortable using them, start with the OpenStack dashboard and then try the OpenStack command line clients.

Finally, experiment with direct language bindings, allowing your software to manage its own infrastructure, or graduate to orchestration tools or configuration management tools. When you’ve wrapped your head around the power and flexibility of API-driven infrastructure, the possibilities are endless.

INTERFACES

Dashboard: A GUI to get

you going

OPENSTACK SERVICES

All the infrastructure,

all the time

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Piston was started by co-founders of OpenStack, and we continue to advocate the open source community, but we are not an open source company.

A FOOTNOTE ON PISTON

Piston is the best and easiest way to run OpenStack. Unlike many of the other OpenStack software distributions, Piston does not focus on building on top of the OpenStack framework, but rather underneath it.

Piston CloudOS with OpenStack supports all of the core components of the OpenStack framework, a hardened Linux micro-OS, and a curated set of virtualization drivers for compute, storage, and networking. In addition, Piston CloudOS automates the complexity involved in configuring and managing them, enabling simple scalability and providing an incredible out-of- the-box enterprise-grade experience. From day one, Piston has focused on making a complete turn-key private cloud software solution for enterprises wanting all of the goodness of an on- premise OpenStack cloud, with none of the fuss of operating it.

Rather than shipping the latest and most recent version of

OpenStack code, Piston supports each previous release until newer versions have been hardened through further community testing and bug fixing.

While some OpenStack vendors focus on delivering the most current and “bleeding-edge” OpenStack code, we pride ourselves on delivering an amazing OpenStack experience; therefore, we ship only the most stable and hardened version of OpenStack available, and only those components that are ready for production use.

Ready to try running OpenStack?

▶ Talk with a Piston Solutions Engineer and get started today.

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