OpenStack

Build a Versatile OpenStack Lab with Kolla

John S. Tonello — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 17:30:00 +0000

Hone your OpenStack skills with a full deployment in a single virtual machine.

It's hard to go anywhere these days without hearing something about the urgent need to deploy on-premises cloud environments that are agile, flexible and don't cost an arm and a leg to build and maintain, but getting your hands on a real OpenStack cluster—the de facto standard—can be downright impossible.

Enter Kolla-Ansible, an official OpenStack project that allows you to deploy a complete cluster successfully—including Keystone, Cinder, Neutron, Nova, Heat and Horizon—in Docker containers on a single, beefy virtual machine. It's actually just one of an emerging group of official OpenStack projects that containerize the OpenStack control plane so users can deploy complete systems in containers and Kubernetes.

To date, for those who don't happen to have a bunch of extra servers loaded with RAM and CPU cores handy, DevStack has served as the go-to OpenStack lab environment, but it comes with some limitations. Key among those is your inability to reboot a DevStack system effectively. In fact, rebooting generally bricks your instances and renders the rest of the stack largely unusable. DevStack also limits your ability to experiment beyond core OpenStack modules, where Kolla lets you build systems that can mimic full production capabilities, make changes and pick up where you left off after a shutdown.

In this article, I explain how to deploy Kolla, starting from the initial configuration of your laptop or workstation, to configuration of your cluster, to putting your OpenStack cluster into service.

Why OpenStack?

As organizations of all shapes and sizes look to speed development and deployment of mission-critical applications, many turn to public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, RackSpace and many others. All make it easy to build the systems you and your organization need quickly. Still, these public cloud services come at a price—sometimes a steep price you only learn about at the end of a billing cycle. Anyone in your organization with a credit card can spin up servers, even ones containing proprietary data and inadequate security safeguards.

OpenStack, a community-driven open-source project with thousands of developers worldwide, offers a robust, enterprise-worthy alternative. It gives you the flexibility of public clouds in your own data center. In many ways, it's also easier to use than public clouds, particularly when OpenStack administrators properly set up networks, carve out storage and compute resources, and provide self-service capabilities to users. It also has tons of add-on capabilities to suit almost any use case you can imagine. No wonder 75% of private clouds are built using OpenStack.

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Everything You Need to Know about the Cloud and Cloud Computing, Part II: Using the Cloud

Petros Koutoupis — Tue, 15 May 2018 11:45:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

How to get started with AWS, install Apache, create an EFS volume and much more.

The cloud is here to stay, regardless of how you access data day to day. Whether you are uploading and sharing new photos with friends in your social-media account or updating documents and spreadsheets alongside your peers in your office or school, chances are you're connecting to the cloud in some form or another.

In the first part of this series, I explored what makes up the cloud and how it functions when all of its separate moving pieces come together. In this article, building from Part I's foundations, I cover using the cloud through some actual examples.

Getting Started with AWS

For the purposes of this article, I'm focusing on a few of the top offerings provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Please know that I hold no affiliation to or with Amazon, nor am I stating that Amazon offerings exceed those of its competitors.

If you haven't already, be sure to register an account. But before you do, understand that charges may apply. Amazon, may provide a free tier of offerings for a limited time, typically a year, to newly registered users. In most cases, the limitations to these offerings are far less than ideal for modern use cases. It is a pay-as-you go model, and you'll be charged only as long as the instance or service continues to be active.

As soon as you are registered and logged in from within your web browser, you'll be greeted by a fairly straightforward dashboard.

Figure 1. The AWS Main Dashboard of services and resources.

Compute

At first, companies leveraging cloud compute applied a straight copy-and-paste of their very own data centers for deploying standard web/application/database servers. The model was the same. There is nothing wrong with that approach. The transition for most converting from on-premises to the cloud would have been somewhat seamless—at least from the perspective of the user accessing those resources. The only real difference being that it was just in a different data center and without the headache of maintaining the infrastructure supporting it.

In the world of AWS, virtual compute servers are managed under the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) stack, from whole virtual instances to containers and more. Let's begin an example EC2 experiment by navigating to the EC2 dashboard.

Figure 2. The Elastic Cloud Computing Dashboard

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SUSE and SAP: Shared Roots Produce Fruit

John Grogan — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 15:15:43 +0000

by John Grogan

SUSE and SAP have been collaborating for 18 years now. SAP is ubiquitous in the enterprise environment, and SUSE is now powering its robust SAP Cloud Platform.

Last year's SUSECon was all about the enterprise. This year's SUSECon doubled down on last year's commitment to becoming a leading enterprise service provider by announcing, among other things, this latest SUSE/SAP collaboration that has SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage as key elements of the SAP Cloud Platform. The fruit of this collaboration will provide robust, enterprise-grade infrastructure services for running applications that allow businesses to collect, manage, analyze and leverage information of all types to extend and connect to business systems.

SAP Cloud Platform is SAP's agile Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for digital transformation, with comprehensive application development services and capabilities that allow businesses to innovate new edge scenarios, ultimately helping them to adapt and advance continuously. It enables customers to achieve business agility, create a truly integrated and optimized enterprise, and accelerate digital transformation across the business without the requirement of maintaining or investing in on-premises infrastructure.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud is an automated cloud computing platform that helps enable organizations to deploy rapidly and manage easily highly available, mixed-hypervisor private clouds. The latest version is based on the OpenStack Newton release. SUSE Enterprise Storage is an intelligent software-defined storage management solution, powered by Ceph technology. It enables IT to transform enterprise storage infrastructure to adapt to changing business and data demands seamlessly by delivering cost-efficient, highly scalable and resilient storage using commodity off-the-shelf servers and disk drives.

"Customers expect extremely high levels of reliability, scalability and performance, and SUSE has worked closely with SAP to help ensure that SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage with SAP Cloud Platform deliver exactly that", said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE chief technology officer. He continued:

Our shared roots run deep, as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has long been a leading platform for SAP solutions on Linux. Today, SUSE also collaborates with SAP within the Cloud Foundry Foundation and shares a vision for the convergence of Kubernetes, containers and Cloud Foundry technologies. Through it all, SUSE's mission is to continue to be the best platform and open-source technology provider for running SAP applications, services and workloads.

Björn Goerke, chief technology officer and president, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP SE, commented:

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OpenStack Gets...Easier

Ed Haskell — Wed, 17 May 2017 14:06:26 +0000

by Ed Haskell

Although the promise of OpenStack and private cloud is huge, and still largely in front of us, the one challenge we've heard from people wanting to try it is "It's a bear!" Its reputation, whether or not well-deserved, is one of being a real challenge for even skilled IT people to install and deploy. For those who feel that way, or for those who believe the hype and have so far chosen not even to try, Platform9 may be what you need.

Platform9, the open-source-as-a-service company making cloud infrastructure easier, announced at the OpenStack Summit that it will now be available in the OpenStack Marketplace's new category for Remotely Managed Private Cloud. The new category features vendors in the OpenStack Marketplace who offer remotely managed private cloud solutions powered by OpenStack.

Founded in 2013 by a team of early VMware engineers, Platform9 provides open-source-as-a-service for enterprises that need faster and easier ways to manage cloud infrastructure across multiple platforms. Unlike do-it-yourself or legacy solutions, Platform9 delivers best-of-breed cloud infrastructure like OpenStack and Kubernetes as SaaS-managed solutions to reduce cost and time to value, all while avoiding being locked in to a single vendor ecosystem.

Platform9's OpenStack-as-a-service offering enables customers to get up and running with an OpenStack cloud within minutes, and it saves time and resources by managing the infrastructure build and deployment process. Platform9 oversees the entire OpenStack lifecycle, with 24/7 health monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting and upgrades. And, that would seem to free up developers to focus on solving core business problems. Enterprise customers of all sizes now have greater access to the efficiency and reliability of OpenStack without the complex, time-consuming set up and deployment.

"With OpenStack traction evolving from early adopters to mainstream enterprise, there is an increasing need for a fast, easy and predictable model to run OpenStack", said Sirish Raghuram, chief executive officer at Platform9. "As evidenced by marquee recent customer wins by Platform9 based on our OpenStack-as-a-service offering, remotely managed OpenStack is the right approach by the foundation to further accelerate mainstream OpenStack adoption."

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Understanding OpenStack's Success

Petros Koutoupis — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 11:51:10 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

At the time I got into the data storage industry, I was working with and developing RAID and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) controllers for 2 Gbit Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN). This was a time before "The Cloud". Things were different—so were our users. There was comfort in buying from a single source or single vendor. In an ideal world, it should all work together, harmoniously, right? And when things go awry, that single vendor should be able to solve every problem within that entire deployment.

That is why, enterprise companies typically bought from a single storage vendor and invested deeply in them. You either bought HP, Dell, EMC, Sun Microsystems or NetApp, which also was successfully carving a new market in Network Attached Storage (NAS). For example, once an EMC shop, always an EMC shop. Hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars were spent to ensure that you were enabled for high availability, fault tolerance, training, support and more. Again, through that single vendor.

This model lasted for quite some time, but in the recent decade, things started to evolve. Customer's wanted more. New technologies, both hardware and software, began to emerge and offer very attractive functionality—virtualization (with VMware) is the first that comes to mind, external Flash arrays, software-defined storage—almost all of which helped to kickstart this thing we call the cloud. The list goes on.

These same shops started to express some frustration in this. They wanted all of these extra features that those same single vendors either did not offer or were too slow in bringing something competitive to market. Instead of running products through a single vendor and using more unified management frameworks to maintain it all, they are now toggling back and forth across multiple management interfaces from multiple vendors to accomplish simple tasks. This is all well and good when the workload is small, but it does not scale very well when that workload increases. How can you log in to a single dashboard and monitor or manage your virtual/physical machines, network, storage and more? What can bring all this moving pieces together?

Enter OpenStack.

What is OpenStack? OpenStack is an Apache-licensed open-source framework designed to build and manage both public and private clouds. Originally started in 2010, an effort jointly launched by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, the project has since grown exponentially and attracted a wide number of supporters and users. It is one of the fastest growing open-source projects of the modern era. The primary goal of OpenStack was to create a single and universal framework to deploy and manage various technologies in the data center dynamically. Its most recent release is Newton (October 2016), which most notably adds support for Docker to enable customers with Container-as-a-Service (Caas) capabilities.

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Permabit Technology Corporation's Albireo VDO for Ubuntu Server

James Gray — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 15:12:43 +0000

by James Gray

In perfect alignment with its self-described identity as "the data reduction expert", Permabit Technology Corporation recently announced availability of its Albireo Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) 6 for Canonical's Ubuntu Server. VDO data reduction enables enterprise hybrid cloud data centers and cloud service providers to reduce their storage footprint, increase data density and avoid costly data-center expansions, resulting in "massive savings on data-center investment".

Permabit says its move to Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS—and imminently 16.04 LTS, as well—is the only modular data reduction solution available for the Linux block storage stack. The move occurred due to Ubuntu's place in the forefront of large cloud infrastructure deployments and its deep involvement in the OpenStack project. VDO leverages Permabit's patented deduplication, HIOPS Compression and thin provisioning technologies.

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Red Hat OpenStack Platform

James Gray — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:05:31 +0000

by James Gray

The adoption of OpenStack in production environments has burgeoned, necessitating increased requirements for enhanced management and seamlessly integrated enterprise capabilities.

Numerous enterprises worldwide rely on Red Hat's offerings in the OpenStack space—that is, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments.

The updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, based on the "Mitaka" release from the upstream OpenStack community, brings technical updates across the board, encompassing nearly all of the major OpenStack projects, and features integrated management for OpenStack through Red Hat CloudForms. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 builds on the proven, trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide critical dependencies needed in production OpenStack environments centered around service functionality, third-party drivers, and system performance and security.

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Elizabeth K. Joseph and Matt Fischer's Common OpenStack Deployments

James Gray — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 15:45:26 +0000

by James Gray

Public and private clouds typically are built and integrated using OpenStack technology. Professionals seeking guidance on this important topic should investigate Elizabeth K. Joseph and Matthew Fischer's new book Common OpenStack Deployments, which its publisher, Prentice Hall, describes as "a complete, practical guide to deploying OpenStack and understanding its internals".

The authors share up-to-date, detailed strategies for deploying OpenStack on both virtual and physical servers, as well for using OpenStack to address any real-world challenge. Joseph and Fischer begin the book by covering OpenStack concepts and components by guiding the reader through small-scale, virtualized deployments. Later, readers learn how to build large, horizontally scalable infrastructures that integrate multiple components in a feature-rich cloud environment. Sprinkled throughout the book is current coverage of enhancements that make the OpenStack platform more mature and production-ready, plus expert tips on debugging and growth. Finally, the authors explain the broader OpenStack ecosystem, illustrating how to drive value through hybrid clouds blending local and hosted solutions.

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Linaro's ARM-Based Developer Cloud

James Gray — Tue, 10 May 2016 20:00:00 +0000

by James Gray

As the adoption of ARM-based servers accelerates and IoT applications rapidly evolve, software developers are demanding access to requisite hardware and software-reference platforms. In response, Linaro released Linaro Developer Cloud, a new cloud-based native ARMv8 development environment, which can be used to design, develop, port and test server, cloud and IoT applications without substantial upfront hardware investment.

The Developer Cloud is the combination of ARM-based silicon vendors' server hardware platforms, emerging cloud technologies and many Linaro member-driven projects, including server-class boot architecture, kernel and virtualization. The Developer Cloud is based on OpenStack, leveraging both Debian and CentOS, as the underlying cloud OS infrastructure. It will use ARM-based server platforms from Linaro members AMD, Cavium, Huawei and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and will expand with demand and as new server platforms come to market.

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Weapons of MaaS Deployment

Kyle Rankin — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 18:06:02 +0000

by Kyle Rankin

My Day with Canonical

I've been researching OpenStack deployment methods lately and so when I got an email from Canonical inviting me to check out how they deploy OpenStack using their Metal as a Service (MaaS) software on their fantastic Orange Box demo platform I jumped at the opportunity. While I was already somewhat familiar with MaaS and Juju from research for my Official Ubuntu Server Book, I'd never seen it in action at this scale. Plus a chance to see the Orange Box--a ten-server computing cluster and network stack that fits in a box about the size of a old desktop computer--was not something I could pass up.

We made all the necessary arrangements and bright and early one morning Dustin Kirkland showed up at my office with a laptop and the second-largest Pelican case I'd ever seen. My team sat down with him as he unpacked and explained a little bit about the Orange Box. Throughout the day we walked through the MaaS and Juju interfaces and used them to bootstrap a few servers that were then configured with Juju: Canonical's service orchestration project. By the end of the day we had not only deployed OpenStack, along the way we set up a Hadoop cluster and even a multi-node transcoding cluster that split up transcoding tasks among the different nodes in the cluster and transcoded a high-definition movie down to a more consumable size in no time. In this article I'm going to introduce the basic concepts behind MaaS, highlight some of it's more interesting new features, and point out a few interesting tips I picked up along the way that you might find useful even if you don't use MaaS or Juju.

It's Orange. It's a Box. It's an Orange Box.

Figure 1: The Orange Box

It's hard to start a discussion about a Canonical MaaS demo without discussing the Orange Box just because it's so cool. I'm not going to spend too much time on it though, first because it's already gotten a good deal of coverage in some other news outlets (ArsTechnica in particular had a great write-up about it). Secondly, while cool, the hardware is still just a demo platform and its purpose is to showcase how MaaS works on real hardware that you can see and touch. There are ten individual servers inside the Orange Box with the following specs:

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