Revisiting the OpenStack ecosystem

OpenStack has been designed to be deployed on a loosely coupled architectural layout. By defining each component of its ecosystem to run independently, it becomes possible to distribute each service among dedicated machines to achieve redundancy. As defined, the base services that constitute the core components in OpenStack are compute, network, and storage services. Based on this, the OpenStack community takes advantage of the base services and the design approach of the cloud software, and keeps developing and joining new open source projects to the OpenStack ecosystem. A variety of new X-As-A-Service projects appear with nearly every OpenStack release.

Getting up to speed with expanding the private cloud setup involves getting to grips core OpenStack services and terms. The following table shows the main projects in OpenStack in its early releases with their corresponding code names:

Of course, the evolution of the OpenStack ecosystem has kept growing to cover more projects and include more services. Since October 2013 (the date of Havana's release), the OpenStack community has shifted to enlarge the services provided by OpenStack within an exhaustive list. The following table shows the extended services of OpenStack (Mitaka release) at the time of writing:

Ultimately, if you want to expand your OpenStack environment to provide more X-As-A-Service user experience, you may need to revisit the core ecosystem first. This will enable you to pinpoint how the new service will be exposed to the end user and predict any change that needs more attention regarding the load and resources usage.