Openstack

Introduction

OpenStack is a set of free software projects that can be used to build infrastructure clouds. services and cloud storage, both public and private.

All projects are distributed under the Apache License.

History

The initiative was launched in July 2010, when Rackspace and NASA announced the discovery of the Nebula platform project code (IaaS for NASA). Rackspace Cloud Files platform.

In May 2011, Canonical announced that OpenStack would become the primary cloud platform. Ubuntu Update 11.10 Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

Previously, the distribution used the Eucalyptus platform for the same purpose.

In October 2011, Rackspace announced its intention to transfer all rights to the code and trademark of OpenStack to the nonprofit organization OpenStack. The Foundation is scheduled to open in 2012.

In mid-August 2012, Red Hat introduced a preview of its OpenStack-based distribution.

A commercial version (with support) appeared in July 2013 with the release of Grizzly.

In September 2014, Cisco announced the acquisition of Metacloud, a company specializing in building and maintaining cloud-based systems. OpenStack open source platform.

The deal was the largest in the history of the OpenStack community.

More than 180 companies joined OpenStack in 2014.

As of 2015, the OpenStack Foundation has more than 500 members, including AppFormix, Arista Networks, AT&T, and AMD. Avaya, Brocade, Canonical, Cisco, Citrix, Comcast, Cray, Dell, Dreamhost, EMC, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Go Daddy, Google, Hewlett-Packard Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Internap, Juniper Networks, Mellanox, Mirantis, MRV, NEC, NetApp, Nexenta, Oracle, PLUMgrid, Pure Storage, Qosmos, Red Hat, Solidfire, SUSE Linux, VMware, VMTurbo, Yahoo! and ZTE.

As of 2015, companies have the highest level of membership (“platinum”) in the non-profit organization coordinating development. AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE.

History of releases

Release numbers are formed according to the YYYY scheme. N. For example, the first release of 2012 has the number 2012.1.

During the development cycle, releases are named using code names. Names are selected in alphabetical order.

For example, the first release is called Austin, the second release is called Bexar, etc.

Names are selected by the OpenStack Foundation. Code names are selected from the cities or countries where the summit takes place.

Main components

The main components of OpenStack:

• Nova is the controller of computing resources.
• Glance is a virtual machine image library, usually backed by Swift.
• Swift - cloud file storage;
• Cinder – a service for working with block storage devices (brought from Nova to a separate project);
• Keystone - identification service;
• Neutron (originally Quantum) is a “network as a service” service between device interfaces (vNICs) that are managed by other OpenStack services.
• Horizon is a graphical administration interface.
• Heat - orchestrator
• Ceilometer is a means of collecting, normalizing and transforming data provided by OpenStack services. The data collected is used to implement different scenarios for responding to events.
• Trove - Database
• Sahara - Elastic Map Reduce
• Ironic - management and maintenance of physical servers (Bare Metal Provisioning)
• Zaqar - Multiple Tenant Cloud Messaging
• Manila - Shared File System Service
• Designate - DNS as a Service (DNSaaS)
• Barbican - Security API
• Searchlight is advanced and scalable indexing and search across multi-user cloud resources.
• Watcher - Optimization of the computing load of cloud resources.

Nova

OpenStack Compute (Nova) is responsible for creating, running, restarting, stopping virtual machines, etc., a component for controlling computing resources.

The module can work with various virtualization technologies (hypervisors), such as KVM, VMware, Xen, as well as Hyper-V and operating system-level virtualization systems, such as LXC.

It can also manage bare metal and high-performance computing configurations.

Nova uses the OpenStack Keystone component to perform authentication, the OpenStack Horizon component as an administration interface, and the OpenStack Glance component to provide its images.

The closest interaction is with the Glance component, which is required by the Nova component to load images for later launch.

The module supports horizontal scaling on standard hardware, and allows integration with legacy systems.

Glance

The Image Service (Glance) component allows you to detect, register and retrieve virtual machine images (VMI).

Glance also stores and manages VMI metadata.

This module manages images in the OpenStack cluster, but is not responsible for their actual storage.

Glance provides abstraction of multiple storage technologies, ranging from simple file systems to object storage systems, such as the OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) project.

In addition to real disk images, Glance contains metadata and state information describing the image.

Swift

Swift (OpenStack Object Storage) is a fully distributed “limitless” storage that is characterized by fault tolerance and high reliability.

Similar to the Amazon S3, Swift is based almost entirely on Rackspace.

Swift functions as a distributed, API-accessible storage platform that can be integrated directly into applications or used to store virtual machine images, backups and archives, as well as smaller files such as photos and emails.

The object is the main essence of storage in Swift. It contains content and all possible additional metadata associated with files stored in the OpenStack Object Storage system.

The data is stored uncompressed and unencrypted and consists of the name of the object, its container and possibly metadata presented in the form of key/value pairs.

Objects are distributed across multiple drives at the scale of the entire data center than Swift guarantees data replication and data integrity. Distributed organization allows the use of inexpensive mass hardware, and also increases redundancy and as a result, scalability and durability.

Cinder

Cinder (OpenStack Block Storage) is a block storage (unlike Swift object storage). The implementation is similar to the Amazon Elastic Block Store solution

Watcher

Watcher (OpenStack Infrastructure Optimization) is designed to optimize existing virtual resources such as virtual machines, images, and volumes. It allows you to balance the cluster through the use of complex strategies, which as a result prepare an action plan for the cluster administrator.

Article author: Andrei Olegovich