Treating OpenStack as code

The Infrastructure as Code concept provides several best practices and patterns that will help us achieve remarkable results for the portfolio of systems within an organization. Without going deeply into details of this concept, the following points show us the advantages of using IaC for our OpenStack deployment:

• It automates the deployment of all OpenStack components through dozens of nodes with less effort, time, cost, and with more reliability
• It audits the OpenStack environment with every change and update
• It defines the desired state of the OpenStack infrastructure
• The system recovers faster from failures by reproducing systems easily from unexpected changes during OpenStack deployment
• It improves the robustness of OpenStack's infrastructure 
• It keeps services available and consistent

In order to take advantage of the mentioned benefits of the concept of IaC, OpenStack environment components can be transformed to a defined role. Each role describes one or more specific elements of the OpenStack infrastructure and details how they should be configured.

Such roles can be written in a configuration definition file, which is a generic term to describe a role of a service or server. Nowadays, many tools have been developed for this purpose such as Chef, Puppet, and Ansible and have a better system management experience. The continuous growth of the  OpenStack ecosystem was a result of the support and dedication of several giant and medium enterprises around the globe. This interest to provide a unique cloud software solution was not limited only to the OpenStack code source but also the contribution to automate its deployment. This covers the development of ready-production artifacts to manage and operate an OpenStack environment through system management tools. That includes Chef cookbooks, Ansible playbooks, and Puppet manifests.