What is Openstack Opensource Cloud Computing for Beginners

This post will help you to understand about What is Openstack Opensource Cloud Computing for Beginners. We will explain you how to install, manage and troubleshoot the Openstack Platform in the next article.

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What is Openstack Opensource Cloud Computing for Beginners?

OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud-computing, mostly deployed as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). It is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds.

The software platform consists of interrelated components that control hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users either manage it through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through a RESTful API.

History of Openstack

OpenStack was created during the first months of 2010. Rackspace wanted to rewrite the infrastructure code running its Cloud servers offering, and considered open sourcing the existing Cloud files code. At the same time, Anso Labs (contracting for NASA) had published beta code for Nova, a Python-based “cloud computing fabric controller”.

Both efforts converged and formed the base for OpenStack. The first Design Summit was held in Austin, TX on July 13-14, 2010, and the project was officially announced at OSCON in Portland, OR, on July 21st, 2010.

Release History of Openstack

Release name	Release date
Austin	21-Oct-10
Bexar	3-Feb-11
Cactus	15-Apr-11
Diablo	22-Sep-11
Essex	5-Apr-12
Folsom	27-Sep-12
Grizzly	4-Apr-13
Havana	17-Oct-13
Icehouse	17-Apr-14
Juno	16-Oct-14
Kilo	30-Apr-15
Liberty	16-Oct-15
Mitaka	7-Apr-16

Components of Openstack

Openstack is a project consists of many components with specific services like Dashboard, Compute, Networking, Object Storage, Block Storage, Identity Service, Image Service, Telemetry, Orchestration. We can install any of these components separately as multinode configuration and configure them stand-alone or as connected entities as a single node configuration.

About Each Components

Service related Components
Name	HORIZON
Purpose	Dashboard
Description	Web based management user interface for management like launching instances, managing networking and setting access controls.
Name	NOVA
Purpose	Compute
Description	A service that manages networks of virtual machines running on nodes, providing virtual machines on demand. It is designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware, downloading images to launch instances as required, spawning, scheduling and decommissioning of virtual machines on demand.
Name	NEURTON
Purpose	Networking
Description	A service that provides connectivity between the interfaces of other OpenStack services. Users can create their own networks, control traffic, and connect servers to other networks. Various networking technologies are supported.
Storage related Components
Name	Swift
Purpose	Object Storage
Description	A service providing object storage which allows users to store and retrieve files. Swift architecture is distributed to allow for horizontal scaling and to provide redundancy as failure-proofing. Data replication is managed by software, allowing greater scalability and redundancy than dedicated hardware.
Name	Cinder
Purpose	Block Storage
Description	It manages storage volumes for virtual machines. This is persistent block storage for the instances running in Nova.
Shared Services related Components
Name	Keystone
Purpose	Identity Management
Description	A centralized identity service that provides authentication and authorization for other services.
Higher Level Service Components
Name	Heat
Purpose	orchestration
Description	A service to orchestrate multiple composite cloud applications using the AWS CloudFormation template format, through both a REST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API. The software integrates other core components of OpenStack into a one-file template system. The templates allow creation of most OpenStack resource types (such as instances, floating IPs, volumes, security groups, users, etc.), as well as some more advanced functionality such as instance high availability, instance auto scaling, and nested stacks.
Name	Glance
Purpose	Image Service
Description	A service that acts as a registry for virtual machine images, allowing users to copy server images for immediate storage. These images can be used as templates when setting up new instances.
Name	Ceilometer
Purpose	Metering
Description	Monitors and meters the OpenStack cloud for billing, benchmarking, scalability, and statistical purposes.

Hope this article gives you an idea and makes you ready to go-ahead for further deployment.

We will explain you how to deploy, manage and troubleshoot these all components in test environment to have a powerful cloud infrastructure.

Keep practicing and have fun. Leave your comments if any.

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