Features and benefits

The power of OpenStack has been tested true by numerous Enterprise grade organizations; thus, gaining the focus of many of the leading IT companies. As this adoption increases, we will surely see an increase in consumption and additional improved features/functionality. For now, let's review some of OpenStack's features and benefits.

Fully distributed architecture

Every service within the OpenStack platform can be grouped together and/or separated to meet your personal use case. Also, as mentioned earlier, only the core services (Keystone, Nova, and Glance) are required to have a functioning cloud; all other components can be optional. This level of flexibility is something every administrator seeks for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.

Uses commodity hardware

OpenStack was uniquely designed to accommodate almost any type of hardware. The underlying OS is the only dependency of OpenStack. As long as OpenStack supports the underlying OS and that OS is supported on the particular hardware, you are all set to go! There is no requirement to purchase OEM hardware or even hardware with specific specs. This gives yet another level of deployment flexibility for administrators. Good example of this can be giving your old hardware sitting around in your data center new life within an OpenStack cloud.

Scale horizontally or vertically

The ability to easily scale your cloud is another key feature to OpenStack. Adding additional compute nodes is as simple as installing the necessary OpenStack services on the new server. The same process is used to expand the OpenStack services control plane as well. Just as with other platforms, you can add more computing resources to any node as an alternate approach to scaling up.

Meets high availability requirements

OpenStack is able to certify meeting high availability (99.9%) requirements for its own infrastructure services, if implemented via the documented best practices.

Compute isolation and multi-DC support

Another key feature of OpenStack is the support to handle compute hypervisor isolation and the ability to support multiple OpenStack regions across data centers. Compute isolation includes the ability to separate multiple pools of hypervisors distinguished by hypervisor type, hardware similarity, and/or vCPU ratio.

The ability to support multiple OpenStack regions, which is a complete installation of functioning OpenStack clouds with shared services, such as Keystone and Horizon, across data centers is a key function to maintain highly available infrastructure. This model eases overall cloud administration; thus, allowing a single pane of glass to manage multiple clouds.

Robust role-based access control

All the OpenStack services allow RBAC while assigning authorization to cloud consumers. This gives cloud operators the ability to decide the specific functions allowed by the cloud consumers. An appropriate example will be to grant a cloud user the ability to create instances but denying the ability to upload new server images or adjust instance-sizing options.