OpenStack Review

OpenStack has a modular architecture with various code names for its components.

OpenStack Compute (Nova) is a cloud computing fabric controller that is  designed to manage and automate pools of computer resources. These can work with widely available virtualization technologies, as well as bare metal and high-performance computing (HPC) configurations. Compute’s architecture is designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware – even without proprietary hardware or software requirements – and can integrate with legacy systems and third-party technologies.

OpenStack Networking (Neutron) is a system for managing networks and IP addresses. The module ensures the network is not a bottleneck or limiting factor in a cloud deployment. Floating IP addresses allows traffic to be dynamically rerouted to any resources in the IT infrastructure, so that users can redirect traffic during maintenance or in case of a failure.

OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) provides continuous block-level storage devices for use with OpenStack compute instances. This manages the creation, attaching and detaching of the block devices to servers.

OpenStack Identity (Keystone) acts as a central directory of users mapped to accesible OpenStack services. The module acts as a common authentication system across the cloud operating system and can integrate with existing backend directory services. Keystone supports multiple forms of authentication, such as standard username and password credentials, token-based systems and web services logins. It also presents a queryable list of all of the services deployed in an OpenStack cloud in a single registry, so that users may programmatically choose which resources they can access.

OpenStack Image (Glance) provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for disk and server images. Stored images can be used as a template and used to catalog an unlimited number of backups. The Image Service can also store disk and server images in a variety of back-ends.

OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) is a scalable redundant storage system where objects and files are written to multiple disk drives. These are spread throughout servers in the data center to ensure data replication and integrity across the cluster. In case a server or hard drive fails, this module replicates its content from other active nodes to new locations in the cluster. With the use of software logic to ensure data replication and distribution across different devices, inexpensive commodity hard drives and servers can be used.

OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) provides administrators and users with a graphical interface to access, provision, and automate deployment of cloud-based resources. The design accommodates third party products and services, such as billing, monitoring, and additional management tools. The dashboard is also brand-able for service providers and other commercial vendors who want to make use of it.

OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer) provides a Single Point Of Contact for billing systems. This provides all of a user’s counters with what they need to rollout customer billing across all current and future OpenStack components. The delivery of counters is traceable and auditable and is extensible to support new projects.

OpenStack Elastic Map Reduce (Sahara) easily provisions Hadoop. Users will specify several parameters like the Hadoop version number, the cluster topology type, node flavor details (defining disk space, CPU and RAM settings), and others. After a user provides all of the parameters, Sahara deploys the cluster in a matter of minutes.

Ironic is an OpenStack project that provisions bare metal machines instead of virtual machines. By default, it will use PXE and IPMI in concert to provision and turn mahines on and off. The feature supports and can be extended with vendor-specific plugins to implement additional functionalities.

Zaqar is OpenStack’s multi-tenant cloud messaging service for Web developers. The service features a fully RESTful API, which developers can use to send messages between various components of their SaaS and mobile applications.

OpenStack Shared File System (Manila) provides an open API to manage shares in a vendor agnostic framework. This offers the ability to create, delete, and allow or deny access to a shared band.

Designate is OpenStack’s multi-tenant REST API for managing DNS. This component provides DNS as a Service and is compatible with many backend technologies, including PowerDNS and BIND. Its purpose is to interface with existing DNS servers to manage DNS zones on a per tenant basis.

Searchlight provides advanced and consistent search capabilities across various OpenStack cloud services. This is done by offloading user search queries from other OpenStack API servers and indexing their data into ElasticSearch.