Community distributions

After each stable release of OpenStack, the software from the resulting stable branches is packaged up by maintainers from three of the major community Linux distributions into the native format for their distribution. These distributions of OpenStack allow users of those distributions to install the software (and its dependencies) using the usual mechanism for that distribution. These distributors also provide documentation at http://openstack.org on how to install and configure the software on their particular distribution.

Most organizations will choose a community distribution based on the Linux distribution that they're most comfortable with. For example, organizations that typically use the Ubuntu Linux distribution will use the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution as well. It's worth noting that the community distributions of OpenStack will work with the commercially supported variants of both openSUSE and CentOS; it's not uncommon for an organization to pay for support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux but to use the community-supported CentOS distribution of OpenStack (RDO).

The choice of community distribution may also have an effect on the availability of installation mechanisms. For example, the Packstack installation tool that we used in Chapter 1, Introducing OpenStack, is specific to the CentOS distribution of OpenStack (RDO). The Ubuntu and openSUSE distributions have other tools to install the OpenStack software. However, the Puppet, Chef, and Ansible mechanisms for deploying OpenStack are distribution (and operating system) agnostic. For example, it is possible to deploy OpenStack on the Ubuntu and CentOS distributions using the same Puppet modules.