Designing OpenStack Cloud Architectural Consideration

The adoption of cloud technology has changed the way enterprises run their IT services. By leveraging new approaches on how resources are being used, several cloud solutions came into play with different categories: private, public, hybrid, and community. Whatever cloud category is used, this trend was felt by many organizations, which needs to introduce an orchestration engine to their infrastructure to embrace elasticity, scalability, and achieve a unique user experience to a certain extent. Nowadays, a remarkable orchestration solution, which falls into the private cloud category, has brought thousands of enterprises to the next era of data center generation: OpenStack. At the time of writing, OpenStack has been deployed in several large to medium enterprise infrastructures, running different types of production workload. The maturity of this cloud platform has been boosted due to the joint effort of several large organizations and its vast developer community around the globe. Within every new release, OpenStack brings more great features, which makes it a glorious solution for organizations seeking to invest in it, with returns in operational workloads and flexible infrastructure.

In this edition, we will keep explaining the novelties of OpenStack within the latest releases and discuss the great opportunities, which OpenStack can offer for an amazing cloud experience.

Deploying OpenStack is still a challenging step, which needs a good understanding of its beneficial returns to a given organization in terms of automation, orchestration, and flexibility. If expectations are set properly, this challenge will turn into a valuable opportunity, which deserves an investment.

After collecting infrastructure requirements, starting an OpenStack journey will need a good design and consistent deployment plan with different architectural assets.

The Japanese military leader, Miyamoto Musashi, wrote the following, very impressive thought on perception and sight, in The Book of Five Rings, Start Publishing LLC:

"In strategy, it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."

Our OpenStack journey will start by going through the following points:

• Getting acquainted with the logical architecture of the OpenStack ecosystem by revisiting its components
• Learning how to design an OpenStack environment by choosing the right core services for the right environment
• Enlarging the OpenStack ecosystem by joining new projects within the latest stable releases
• Designing the first OpenStack architecture for a large-scale environment
• Planning for growth by going through first-deployment best practices and capacity planning