Project: OpenStack Deep Dive
Posted by Kyle Pericak in projects
This project is a "Deep Dive": In a Deep Dive project I'll be investigating as much about the subject as time allows and assembling the posts in some orderly fashion. I'll also be writing high-level notes and opinions in the project page itself.
What is OpenStack?
OpenStack is a collection of open-source projects that work together to form a private cloud solution. It's by far the biggest open source private cloud option available. The OpenStack Foundation has over 105,000 community members from 187 countries around the world.
At a high level, you can think of it as an abstraction layer that sits on top of other popular cloud technologies such as storage clusters, hypervisors, and network solutions. For example, KVM (the popular Linux hypervisor) is not part of OpenStack, but it's used by Nova, a component of OpenStack which can orchestrate against KVM, VMWare, HyperV, and Xen.
Project Posts & Progress
This project includes, or will include, the following posts. If any aren't finished, check back later! I'll also certainly be adding more as time goes on.
| Status | Article |
|---|---|
| - | Installing Openstack |
| Done | Install OpenStack on Metal - Intel NUC |
| Done | Install OpenStack inside a VM |
| Done | Modifying OpenStack Kolla Docker Images |
| - | Kubernetes on OpenStack |
| WIP - Paused | Installing OpenStack Magnum for Kubernetes-as-a-service |
| - | Operating Openstack Clouds |
| Done | Operating OpenStack from Ansible |
| Not Started | OpenStack Command-Line Cheat-Sheet |
| Not Started | Using Heat: IAC for OpenStack |
| Done | OpenStack Cloud-Init Powershell Example |
| - | OpenStack Images |
| Done | Injecting KVM Drivers into Windows |
Why Use an OpenStack Private Cloud?
- Price at scale: At small scales, private clouds lose on price against the public clouds. As you start to ramp up though, the public clouds start to really nickle and dime you. Private clouds have higher up-front costs but they win out in the long-run.
- Predictable Cost: Spin up a few services on AWS or Azure. How much will they cost you each month? As it stands, you're guess is going to be wrong. After the free trial periods and special offers stop muddying the water, you'll usually discover you're spending more than you thought.
- Hardware Re-Use: Many IT organizations already have hardware sitting around running expensive hypervisor software. OpenStack is free and can use that existing hardware, giving you more for less.
- Data Sovereignty: For legal and security reasons, many organizations must know exactly where their data is sitting at rest. With private clouds, there's no ambiguity.
- Behind Your Firewall: So you spent a ton of money on some next generation firewall technologies with intrusion detection/prevention, and trained the staff up to use it. You run an arguably well secured data-center. Running OpenStack keeps the cloud behind your existing security measures.
- Latency: Particularly for edge clouds and VDI solutions, having the cloud located right on-premises can hugely improve user experience.
- Shadow IT: Developers are going to develop, even if your organization can't get them the tools they need in time. By offering your own in-house cloud, you can help prevent shadow IT from emerging.
- Control: This one is a double-edged sword. Having more control over your cloud can be its own benefit, but there's also value in letting the pros handle it.
- Business as usual, without VMWare: Don't get me wrong, VMWare make a great product... I've never heard anyone say they were happy with their VMWare bill. It's insanely expensive when there's an open source alternative that can check all the same boxes.
Complexity and OpenStack (Ad)
OpenStack is significantly more difficult to get started with than the public clouds. You can't really install OpenStack without first understanding what each of the main components does, and even then each one has its own quirks for their installation. If you want to install in production, you also need to figure out how to get it all highly available.
Unless you've got a huge team that's eager to tackle this complexity, I'm going to use this opportunity to plug the software & solution I've helped build for Breqwatr. They'll stand up your cloud in a couple days flat, teach your team how to use it, and keep the lights on - all while charging significantly less than VMWare would cost for the same hardware.
Breqwatr, and companies like it, can be your trusted cloud partner and abstract away that complexity by handling the installation, upgrades, monitoring, and day-to-day operation of the cloud.
Installing OpenStack
Non-Production Installation Options
If you're not looking for a production deployment and instead want to try OpenStack out to learn it, there are a few good options.
DevStack
The standard developer option is probably DevStack.
In truth I haven't used this since I've always needed my OpenStack installs to mirror a production-ready environment. If I try it out, I'll replace the above link with one to a guide I write myself.
Small Physical Server + Kolla-Ansible
Another option is to install OpenStack on a physical server. I've documented my experience doing this using images from the Kolla project, and Ansible automation from the Kolla-Ansible project.
The nice thing about this approach is you can use a server at home, and once you're done it can be a VM host as your private house cloud.
Installing OpenStack on a physical server
Virtual Server + Kolla-Ansible
This option is great for development use if you already have a cloud available or want to use a public cloud for testing OpenStack. The VMs you launch on it will perform terribly though, and there are some networking complications.
Don't bother trying to launch Windows VMs at all in a nested virtualisation scenario, you'll be lucky if they even boot.
Installing OpenStack on a Virtual Server
Containerized OpenStack
Managing OpenStack clusters is a pain. It has so many services, each with their own dependencies and operating instructions, there's a lot that can go wrong. One thing that's really helped with that is to containerize each service and deploy them all using Docker.
The Kolla project does such a great job of that, that there's no need to do it yourself. That is, until you need to change an image, for instance to install a Cinder plugin.