Rapid application development

Over the past couple of years, a third significant use case has emerged for OpenStack—enterprise application development environments. While public hosting and high-performance compute implementations may have huge regions with hundreds of compute nodes and thousands of cores, enterprise implementations tend to have regions of 20 to 50 compute nodes. Enterprise adopters have a strong interest in software-defined networking.

The primary driver for enterprise adoption of OpenStack has been the increasing use of continuous integration and continuous delivery in the application development workflow. A typical Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflow will deploy a complete application on every developer commit, which passes basic unit tests in order to perform automated integration testing. These application deployments live as long as it takes to run the unit tests, and then an automated process tears down the deployment once the tests pass or fail. This workflow is easily facilitated with a combination of OpenStack compute and network services.

While Architects of hosting or High-Performance Computing (HPC) clouds spend a lot of time focusing on tenancy and scaling issues, Architects of enterprise deployments will spend a lot of time focusing on how to integrate OpenStack compute into their existing infrastructure. Enterprise deployments will frequently leverage existing service catalog implementations and identity management solutions. Many enterprise deployments will also need to integrate with existing IPAM and asset tracking systems.