What is OpenStack?

 Introduction 

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering users to provision resources through a web interface.

Cloud computing provides users with access to a shared collection of computing resources: networks for transfer, servers for storage, and applications or services for completing tasks.

The compelling features of a cloud are:

• On-demand self-service: Users can automatically provision needed computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, without requiring human interaction with each service provider.
• Network access: Any computing capabilities are available over the network. Many different devices are allowed access through standardized mechanisms.
• Resource pooling: Multiple users can access clouds that serve other consumers according to demand.
• Elasticity: Provisioning is rapid and scales out or is based on need.
• Metered or measured service: Cloud systems can optimize and control resource use at the level that is appropriate for the service. Services include storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts. Monitoring and reporting of resource usage provides transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

Cloud computing offers different service models depending on the capabilities a consumer may require.

• SaaS: Software-as-a-Service. Provides the consumer the ability to use the software in a cloud environment, such as web-based email for example.
• PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service. Provides the consumer the ability to deploy applications through a programming language or tools supported by the cloud platform provider. An example of Platform-as-a-service is an Eclipse/Java programming platform provided with no downloads required.
• IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Provides infrastructure such as computer instances, network connections, and storage so that people can run any software or operating system.

Terms such as public cloud or private cloud refer to the deployment model for the cloud. A private cloud operates for a single organization, but can be managed on-premise or off-premise. A public cloud has an infrastructure that is available to the general public or a large industry group and is likely owned by a cloud services company.

Clouds can also be described as hybrid. A hybrid cloud can be a deployment model, as a composition of both public and private clouds, or a hybrid model for cloud computing may involve both virtual and physical servers.

Cloud computing can help with large-scale computing needs or can lead consolidation efforts by virtualizing servers to make more use of existing hardware and potentially release old hardware from service. Cloud computing is also used for collaboration because of its high availability through networked computers. Productivity suites for word processing, number crunching, and email communications, and more are also available through cloud computing. Cloud computing also avails additional storage to the cloud user, avoiding the need for additional hard drives on each user's desktop and enabling access to huge data storage capacity online in the cloud.

OpenStack is an open source software for building private and public clouds which delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system.

What is OpenStack?

OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. Backed by some of the biggest companies in software development and hosting, as well as thousands of individual community members, many think that OpenStack is the future of cloud computing. OpenStack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit which oversees both development and community-building around the project.

OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other instances which handle different tasks for managing a cloud environment on the fly. It makes horizontal scaling easy, which means that tasks which benefit from running concurrently can easily serve more or less users on the fly by just spinning up more instances. For example, a mobile application which needs to communicate with a remote server might be able to divide the work of communicating with each user across many different instances, all communicating with one another but scaling quickly and easily as the application gains more users.

And most importantly, OpenStack is open source software, which means that anyone who chooses to can access the source code, make any changes or modifications they need, and freely share these changes back out to the community at large. It also means that OpenStack has the benefit of thousands of developers all over the world working in tandem to develop the strongest, most robust, and most secure product that they can.

How is OpenStack used in a cloud environment?

The cloud is all about providing computing for end users in a remote environment, where the actual software runs as a service on reliable and scalable servers rather than on each end users computer. Cloud computing can refer to a lot of different things, but typically the industry talks about running different items "as a service"—software, platforms, and infrastructure. OpenStack falls into the latter category and is considered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Providing infrastructure means that OpenStack makes it easy for users to quickly add new instance, upon which other cloud components can run. Typically, the infrastructure then runs a "platform" upon which a developer can create software applications which are delivered to the end users.

What are the components of OpenStack?

OpenStack is made up of many different moving parts. Because of its open nature, anyone can add additional components to OpenStack to help it to meet their needs. But the OpenStack community has collaboratively identified nine key components that are a part of the "core" of OpenStack, which are distributed as a part of any OpenStack system and officially maintained by the OpenStack community.

·         Nova is the primary computing engine behind OpenStack. It is a "fabric controller," which is used for deploying and managing large numbers of virtual machines and other instances to handle computing tasks.

·         Swift is a storage system for objects and files. Rather than the traditional idea of a referring to files by their location on a disk drive, developers can instead refer to a unique identifier referring to the file or piece of information and let OpenStack decide where to store this information. This makes scaling easy, as developers don’t have the worry about the capacity on a single system behind the software. It also allows the system, rather than the developer, to worry about how best to make sure that data is backed up in case of the failure of a machine or network connection.

·         Cinder is a block storage component, which is more analogous to the traditional notion of a computer being able to access specific locations on a disk drive. This more traditional way of accessing files might be important in scenarios in which data access speed is the most important consideration.

·         Neutron provides the networking capability for OpenStack. It helps to ensure that each of the components of an OpenStack deployment can communicate with one another quickly and efficiently.

·         Horizon is the dashboard behind OpenStack. It is the only graphical interface to OpenStack, so for users wanting to give OpenStack a try, this may be the first component they actually “see.” Developers can access all of the components of OpenStack individually through an application programming interface (API), but the dashboard provides system administrators a look at what is going on in the cloud, and to manage it as needed.

·         Keystone provides identity services for OpenStack. It is essentially a central list of all of the users of the OpenStack cloud, mapped against all of the services provided by the cloud which they have permission to use. It provides multiple means of access, meaning developers can easily map their existing user access methods against Keystone.

·         Glance provides image services to OpenStack. In this case, "images" refers to images (or virtual copies) of hard disks. Glance allows these images to be used as templates when deploying new virtual machine instances.

·         Ceilometer provides telemetry services, which allow the cloud to provide billing services to individual users of the cloud. It also keeps a verifiable count of each user’s system usage of each of the various components of an OpenStack cloud. Think metering and usage reporting.

·         Heat is the orchestration component of OpenStack, which allows developers to store the requirements of a cloud application in a file that defines what resources are necessary for that application. In this way, it helps to manage the infrastructure needed for a cloud service to run.

Who is OpenStack for?

You may be an OpenStack user right now and not even know it! As more and more companies begin to adopt OpenStack as a part of their cloud toolkit, the universe of applications running on an OpenStack backend is ever-expanding.

Terminology:

Host Operating System (Host). The operating system that is installed on your laptop or desktop that hosts virtual machines. This is commonly referred to as the host OS or host. In short, the machine where your VirtualBox is installed.

Guest Operating System (Guest). The operating system that is installed on your VirtualBox Virtual Machine. This virtual instance is independent of the host OS. It is commonly referred to as the guest OS or guest.

Node. In Openstack context, node refers specifically to servers. Each OpenStack server is a node.

Control Node. Hosts the database, Keystone (Middleware), and the servers for the scope of the current OpenStack deployment. It acts as the brains behind OpenStack and drives services such as authentication, database, and so on.

Compute Node. Has the required Hypervisor (Qemu/KVM) and is your Virtual Machine host.

Network Node. Provides Network-as-a-Service and virtual networks for OpenStack.

Using OpenSSH. After the network interfaces file has been setup, you can switch to an SSH session by using an OpenSSH client to log in remotely to the required server node (Control, Network, Compute). Open a terminal on your host machine and run the following command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

Generating public/private rsa key pair.

Enter the location in which to save the key (/u/kim/.ssh/id_rsa): [RETURN]

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): <can be left empty>

Enter same passphrase again: <can be left empty>

Your identification has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.

Your public key has been saved in /home/user/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

The key fingerprint is:

b7:18:ad:3b:0b:50:5c:e1:da:2d:6f:5b:65:82:94:c5 xyz@example