“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...| By Jonathan Gershater | Article Rating: |
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| April 1, 2013 05:45 AM EDT | Reads: |
4,344 |
Overview
OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service offering. (see my prior post for an explanation of IaaS).
OpenStack is an OpenSource project, founded by RackSpace, NASA and others.
OpenStack can be deployed as a public or private cloud.
The OpenStack projects are: CINDER, GLANCE, KEYSTONE, NOVA, QUANTUM, SWIFT.
OpenStack Compute: (NOVA)
Project NOVA, or OpenStack Compute, provisions and manages on-demand virtual machines and associated resources: CPU, Memory, Disk and Network.
Virtual machines can be started, stopped, suspended, created and deleted, while network options for a virtual machine are static, DHCP, or IPv6.
The virtual machines run on hypervisors such as XEN or KVM, but others are supported too - even VMware ESXi!
Users and administrators use the GUI to request virtual machines, while developers may typically use an API.
Security? Of course there are security groups, similar to AWS, to control access to virtual machines and RBAC to govern user access by role and project.
Storage
Object Storage (project SWIFT)
Object Storage is a distributed storage system for static data such as files (graphics, movies) and virtual machine images. Objects and files are written to multiple disk drives, while OpenStack is responsible for ensuring data replication and integrity. Storage scales horizontally by adding new servers. If a server or hard drive fails, OpenStack replicates its content from other active servers to new servers in the cluster. Since OpenStack uses software to ensure data replication and distribution across servers, inexpensive servers can be used rather than expensive storage hardware.
Block storage (project CINDER)
Block storage is essentially volumes used by OpenStack virtual machines. Snapshots back up data stored on block storage volumes. Snapshots can be restored or used to create a new block storage volume.
Network (project QUANTUM)
OpenStack provides networking models to accomodate different applications or users. Standard network models include flat networks or VLANs to separate servers and network traffic. OpenStack Networking manages IP addresses, to allocate static or DHCP addresses. Floating IP addresses allow traffic to be dynamically rerouted to any compute resource, for example to redirect traffic during maintenance or in the case of a failure. OpenStack Networking has an extension framework to add intrusion detection systems (IDS), load balancing, firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) .
Shared Services
Identity services (project KEYSTONE)
OpenStack Identity provides a central repository of users mapped to the OpenStack services they can access. OpenStack identity is a common authentication system and integrates with existing backend directory services such as LDAP. It supports several forms of authentication including username and password, tokens and AWS-type logins. The identity service also provides a queryable list of services deployed in the OpenStack cloud and users can programmatically determine their level of access.
OpenStack.
OpenStack Administrators can:
- Configure centralized policies across users and systems
- Create users and tenants and define permissions for compute, storage and networking resources using role-based access control (RBAC)
- Integrate with an existing directory like LDAP, allowing for a single source of identity authentication across the cloud.
Image services (Project GLANCE)
The OpenStack Image Service provides discovery, registration and delivery services for disk and server images. Saved images can be used as a template to get new virtual servers up and running (especially useful for multiple servers of the same type and configuration). It can also be used to store and catalog an umlimited number of backups.
The image service stores private and public images in a variety of formats:
- AMI
- qcow2 (Qemu/KVM)
- OVF (Open Virtualization Format)
- RAW
- VDI (VirtualBox)
- VHD (Hyper-V)
- VMDK (VMWare)
Image below courtesy of OpenStack.org

Published April 1, 2013 Reads 4,344
Copyright © 2013 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Jonathan Gershater
Jonathan Gershater has lived and worked in Silicon Valley since 1996, primarily doing system and sales engineering specializing in: Web Applications, Identity and Security. At Trend Micro he works with customers to secure their virtual and cloud environments. Prior to joining Trend Micro, Jonathan worked at 3Com, Entrust (by acquisition) two startups and Sun Microsystems.
(The views expressed in this blog are entirely mine and do not represent my employer - Jonathan).
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New, "Super-Sized" 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.
As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Ev...
“Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued.
Cloud Computing Journal: The move ...
Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how.
In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMB...
Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time consuming effort that requires experts. In his upcoming session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Michael Kopp will be showing how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up Hadoop jobs at the core, without going through tons of log files, beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days.
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the crit...
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