Deploying OpenStack - The DevOps Way

"Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization."
                                                                                  - Federico Garcia Lorca

Deploying an OpenStack environment based on the profiled design, as shown in the previous chapter, is not simple. Although we created our design by taking care of several aspects related to scalability and performance, we still have to make it real. If you are still looking at OpenStack as a single block system, you should take a step back and recheck what was explained in Chapter 1, Designing OpenStack Cloud Architectural Consideration. Furthermore, in the introductory section of this book, we covered the role of OpenStack in the next generation of data centers. A large-scale infrastructure used by cloud providers with a few thousand servers needs a very different approach to setup.

In our case, deploying and operating the OpenStack cloud is not as simple as you might think. Thus, you need to make the operational task easier or, in other words, automated.

In this chapter, we will cover new topics about the ways to deploy OpenStack. The next part will cover the following points:

• Learning what the DevOps movement is and how it can be adopted in the cloud
• Knowing how to see your infrastructure as code and how to maintain it
• Getting closer to the DevOps way by including configuration management aspects in your cloud
• Making your OpenStack environment design deployable via automation
• Starting your first OpenStack environment deployment using Ansible