Preface

The OpenStack Orchestration program aims to create a human and machine-accessible service that manages the entire life cycle of infrastructure and applications within OpenStack clouds. Heat is the cloud orchestration service for the OpenStack framework. It implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code. It is the most popular and a still-emerging IaaS cloud framework.

This book focuses on setting up and using one of the most important services in OpenStack Orchestration, Heat. First, the book introduces you to the orchestration service for OpenStack to help you understand the uses of the templating mechanism, complex control groups of cloud resources, and huge potential and multiple-use cases. It then moves on to the topology and orchestration specification for cloud applications and standards, before introducing the most popular IaaS cloud framework, Heat. You will get to grips with the standards used in Heat, an overview and a roadmap, the architecture and CLI, the Heat API, the Heat engine, the CloudWatch API, scaling principles, JeOS, and the installation and configuration of Heat. I'll wrap up by giving you some insights into troubleshooting for OpenStack.

With easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions and supporting images, you will be able to manage OpenStack operations by implementing the orchestration services of Heat.