DataCentred's Senior Cloud Systems Engineer, Nick Jones, talks about OpenStack - a cloud operating system.

1. Introduction
Nick Jones
Senior Cloud Systems Engineer at DataCentred
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2. Agenda
• Introduction to OpenStack
• What does it do
• Project history
• Who uses it
• OpenStack Components
• Core components
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3. Agenda, cont.
• OpenStack Architecture
• How everything fits together
• Installation
• Tools to deploy OpenStack
• Operation and Maintenance
• Care and feeding of an OpenStack installation
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4. What is OpenStack?
"OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools
of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a
datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives
administrators control while empowering their users to provision
resources through a web interface."
-- https://www.openstack.org/software/
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5. Project History
• July 2010, privately developed by RackSpace and NASA
• October 2010, first release - 'Austin'
• February 2011, 'Bexar', April 2011, 'Cactus' - 6-month
development cycle starts
• April 2014, Icehouse - still security supported
• October 2014, Juno - current Production release
• April 2015, Kilo - under development
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6. Who uses OpenStack
• CERN - LHC, 4000+ physical hosts
• WalMart - entire US production traffic
• BMW
• eBay
• Disney
• Comcast
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7. OpenStack Components
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Thanks to Sean Dague - https://dague.net
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8. Identity Service - Keystone
• Centralized policies across users and systems
• Create users and tenants with appropriate permissions
• Integrate into existing directory services (LDAP)
• Maintains catalogue of services
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9. Image Service - Glance
• Operating System images
• Snapshots
• Supports many formats - RAW, qcow2 (QEMU / KVM), VMDK
(VMware), OVF, etc.
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10. Compute Service - Nova
• Effectively the 'brain' of an OpenStack installation
• Manage virtualised hardware resources
• Can also provide software-defined networking
• Supports many different hypervisors - KVM, Xen, VMware
ESXi, Hyper-V...
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11. Networking Service - Neutron
• Software-defined networking component
• Users define their own virtual networks
• Manages IP address assignment
• Floating IP addresses
• Supports different back-ends - OpenvSwitch, VMware NSX,
Cisco UCS, Midokura....
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12. Block Storage Service - Cinder
• Persistent block storage to compute instances
• Support for various back-ends - Ceph, NetApp, Nexenta,
SolidFire...
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13. Other key services
• Horizon - web UI / dashboard
• Ceilometer - monitoring and metering / billing
• Swift - object and block storage
• Ceph - alternative for object and block storage
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14. Choice!
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15. Supporting Services
• Presentation - Apache, nginx
• Loadbalancing - keepalived, haproxy
• Messaging - RabbitMQ
• State - MySQL / MariaDB
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16. Infrastructure
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17. Virtual machine
creation
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18. Physical deployment
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19. Scale-out architecture
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20. Network
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21. Network, continued
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22. Installation
• Manual installations untenable for any serious deployment
• Use configuration management and orchestration
• Puppet
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23. Deployment with Puppet
• Programmatically define server and service configuration
• Relationships between services
• Driven by data
• Describe and document infrastructure
• Scalable
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24. Puppet, continued
• OpenStack official Puppet modules
• Neutron = 8422 LOC
• Nova = 6678 LOC
• Glance = 3336 LOC
• Cinder = 6379 LOC
• Keystone = 4020 LOC
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25. 2478 LOC to deploy
OpenStack
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26. Foreman
• Lifecycle management
• Physical and virtual
• External node classification (ENC) for Puppet - control node,
network node, compute node
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27. Operation and
Maintenance
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28. Monitoring
collectd, graphite, Grafana
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29. Monitoring, continued
• ELK stack
• Elasticsearch, logstash, Kibana
• Riemann
• Icinga / Nagios
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30. Development
• Python
• Build staging and test - OpenStack-on-OpenStack
• Devstack
• Make use of tools such as Vagrant
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31. Patching
Giftwrap - https://github.com/blueboxgroup/giftwrap
• Manage patches
• Security
• Features
• Fixes
• Resolve dependancies
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32. Problems
• Developer expertise
• Tackle features like onboarding
• Gaps in features
• Networking HA still a bit of a mess
• Incomplete IPv6 support
• Hypervisor scheduling
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33. Problems, continued
• Supporting services
• HA with RabbitMQ doesn't always work as expected
• Some services outside of 'core' less reliable
• Ceilometer in particular
• Horizon can be confusing and has some idiosyncrasies
• Nothing to stop you building your own alternative!
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34. Questions?
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