Breaking down OpenStack into pieces

Let’s gather what we covered previously and signal a few steps towards our first OpenStack deployment:

• Break down the OpenStack infrastructure into independent and reusable services.
• Integrate the services in such a way that you can provide the expected functionalities in the OpenStack environment.

It is obvious that OpenStack includes many services, as discussed in Chapter 1, Designing OpenStack Cloud Architectural Consideration. What we need to do is see these services as packages of code in our infrastructure as code experience. The next step will investigate how to integrate the services and deploy them via automation.

Deploying service as code is similar to writing a software application. Here are some important points you should remember during the entire deployment process:

• Simplify and modularize the OpenStack services
• Develop OpenStack services as building blocks that integrate with other components to provide a complete system
• Facilitate the customization and improvement of services without impacting the complete system.
• Use the right tool to build the services
• Be sure that the services provide the same results with the same input
• Switch your service vision from how to do it to what we want to do

Automation is the essence of DevOps. In fact, many system management tools are intensely used nowadays due to their efficiency of deployment. In other words, there is a need for automation!

You have probably used some of available the automation tools, such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and many more. Before we go through them, we need to create a succinct, professional code management step.