Preface

Today, OpenStack becomes a massive project increasingly extended with new features and subprojects. As hundreds of large array of enterprises are adopting and continuously contributing to the OpenStack ecosystem, it becomes the ultimate next generation private cloud solution. The range of services supported by OpenStack has grown naturally with the integration of new projects. This was a result of the innate stability of the core components of OpenStack and its great modular architecture. OpenStack has proved to be a mature private cloud platform for providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capabilities. With the emergence of new projects, the OpenStack ecosystem is trending to provide cloud services associated with Platform as a Service (PaaS). Why you should consider adopting OpenStack? There are many use cases and approaches that justify the adoption of OpenStack in any infrastructure based on various requirements and development needs. Still to think about how a private setup could rule the enterprise infrastructure, more specifically with OpenStack. The fundamental approach of such modular cloud platform is to provide more flexibility to manage the underlying infrastructure. Turning a traditional data center to a private cloud setup leverages the power of automation and increase the responsiveness for service delivery. You may notice while operating an OpenStack setup how easy it is to spin up new components. Its modular architecture unleashes the power of OpenStack as a pluggable cloud software solution. Another advantageous reason is its REST APIs exposure for each service. This embraces automation and easily facilitates the integration within the existing system setup. OpenStack can point you to the right path to overcome issues with legacy IT and vendor lock in. Within the latest releases of OpenStack, more modules and plugins have been developed to support third-party software services, including compute, storage, and network components.

In this new edition, we will be moving to a new learning path that will cover the novelty in OpenStack within the latest releases. Ideally, we will continue our journey by revisiting the OpenStack components and design patterns. We keep updating what is new in the core services architecture of OpenStack. That will cover new compute segregation and supported capabilities, including containerization, new network service shape, which includes Software Defined Network (SDN) and extends storage layout in OpenStack with the new incubated project. In each part of this edition, we keep sharing the experience in forms of best practices inspired from deployed OpenStack projects. We take a different method in this edition for automating the OpenStack deployment using system management tools on containers for the lab setup to mimic a real-production environment. This will give you a deep insight on the novelty of the OpenStack ecosystem and how to adopt it to meet your business needs.

The final section of this book will provide a complementary part in an OpenStack-ready production setup that includes administration, troubleshooting, monitoring, and benchmarking tool sets.