OpenStack for Architects

Design and implement successful private clouds with OpenStack

About This Book

• Explore the various design choices available for cloud architects within an OpenStack deployment
• Craft an OpenStack architecture and deployment pipeline to meet the unique needs of your organization
• Create a product roadmap for Infrastructure as a Service in your organization using this hands-on guide

Who This Book Is For

This book is written especially for those who will design OpenStack clouds and lead their implementation. These people are typically cloud architects, but may also be in product management, systems engineering, or enterprise architecture.

What You Will Learn

• Familiarize yourself with the components of OpenStack
• Build an increasingly complex OpenStack lab deployment
• Write compelling documentation for the architecture teams within your organization
• Apply Agile configuration management techniques to deploy OpenStack
• Integrate OpenStack with your organization's identity management, provisioning, and billing systems
• Configure a robust virtual environment for users to interact with
• Use enterprise security guidelines for your OpenStack deployment
• Create a product roadmap that delivers functionality quickly to the users of your platform

In Detail

Over the last five years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders such as Red Hat have led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Because of its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill-set to design and implement it.

This guide leads you through each of the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. At each point, we offer you advice based on the experience we've gained from designing and leading successful OpenStack projects in a wide range of industries. Each chapter also includes lab material that gives you a chance to install and configure the technologies used to build production-quality OpenStack clouds. Most importantly, we focus on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout.

Style and approach

This is practical, hands-on guide to implementing OpenStack clouds, where each topic is illustrated with real-world examples and then the technical points are proven in the lab.

Michael Solberg, as a chief architect, is responsible for helping Red Hat customers achieve their key business transformation initiatives through open source architectures and technologies. He regularly advises a range of Fortune 100 companies in financial services, healthcare, retail, and transportation verticals on topics such as cloud computing, big data, high-performance computing, and enterprise middleware. At Red Hat since 2008, Michael has led a number of successful initiatives to assist strategic customers adopt new virtualization, systems management, and engineering practices. His previous experience includes building web hosting infrastructure. He is also an avid supporter of the OpenStack project. Michael holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of Georgia and is a regular speaker at industry events.

Ben Silverman, as the Principal Cloud Architect for OnX Enterprise Solutions, is responsible for providing strategic and tactical cloud leadership to OnX s customers. Previously, Ben was a Senior Cloud Architect at Mirantis, where he developed cloud solutions for many Fortune 100 companies. Ben has been involved with OpenStack since the Havana release and is an active technical contributor. Prior to working for Mirantis, Ben was the Lead Technical Architect at American Express, where he built one of the largest financial services OpenStack clouds at that time. Ben is an exuberant OpenStack evangelist who is often seen speaking at industry events and conventions about OpenStack adoption, scale challenges, and cloud operations. In his limited spare time, Ben and a few others have taken on the task of re-writing all of the OpenStack architecture and operations guides that are currently available on the OpenStack Foundation website. Ben has a Master s degree in Information Management from Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix, AZ.