Imagine a data centre. Hundreds of physical machines, racked, powered and connected to each other. One tool turns this data centre into a cloud and enables on-demand resource provisioning through a self-service portal. That’s OpenStack!
A private cloud is a cost-efficient extension of the public cloud infrastructure. Since more and more organisations are deciding to use multi-cloud architecture, implementing a private cloud is a natural step once the number of workloads grows. Although CapEx costs associated with an initial deployment of the private cloud are high, its OpEx costs are significantly lower compared to public clouds. As a result, the aggregated total cost of ownership (TCO) per virtual machine (VM) is lower when running workloads in the long term and at scale. This allows businesses to optimise their infrastructure costs and always run their applications where it makes most of the sense from the economical point of view.
Unlike traditional virtualisation management platforms, such as VMware vSphere or Red Hat Virtualization Manager, OpenStack is a fully functional cloud platform as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This means that OpenStack basically resembles the behaviour of public clouds. Users can request compute, network and storage resources on-demand through a self-service portal. Although they are provided in the form of virtual machines, virtual network and virtual disks, exactly as in the traditional virtualisation management platforms, they are defined through the APIs. For businesses, the ability to define virtualised resources programmatically enables fast-paced infrastructure automation and cloud-style operations.
But there are more differences between OpenStack and traditional virtualisation management platforms. Refer to the following table for more information:
| OpenStack | Virtualisation management platforms | |
|---|---|---|
| TCO | Low | High |
| Resource management methodology | “Cattle” | “Pets” |
| Resource provisioning mechanism | Template-based | Image-based |
| Hardware | Commodity | Specialised |
| Scalability | Scale out | Scale up |
| Workload | Stateless | Stateful |
| Open source | Yes | Mostly no |
OpenStack is an open source private cloud platform designed to manage distributed compute, network and storage resources in the data centre. In principle, OpenStack aggregates physical resources into one big pool and allocates virtual resources out of this pool to users who can request them on-demand through a self-service portal or application programming interfaces (APIs). But OpenStack itself does not handle virtualisation. Instead, it leverages the existing virtualisation technologies. Therefore, OpenStack is more like a wrapper around traditional virtualisation tools, enabling cloud-native capabilities.
OpenStack is based on a modular architecture. There are six primary OpenStack components which handle compute, network and storage functions for on-demand VM provisioning. A bunch of other components enable additional features, such as dashboarding, bare metal provisioning, containers, secrets management and telemetry. In order to handle this complexity, organisations often use OpenStack Charms for fully automated OpenStack installation and post-deployment operations.
Nova is the primary compute engine of OpenStack, responsible for instance scheduling, creation and termination. In order to ensure widespread interoperability, Nova supports a wide range of hypervisors, including QEMU/KVM, Hyper-V, VMware ESXi and Xen.
Glance is an image service, responsible for uploading, managing and retrieving cloud images for instances running on OpenStack. Glance works across a variety of stores to provide the most convenient location of images for organisations.
Neutron provides network connectivity between OpenStack instances, enabling multi-VM deployments. For this purpose, Neutron uses various software defined networking (SDN) technologies, including Open Virtual Network (OVN), Open vSwitch (OVS), Juniper Contrail, Cisco ACI, etc.
Cinder is a storage component that is responsible for provisioning, management and termination of persistent block devices. Those can be later attached to the instances running on OpenStack to enable persistent block storage.
Swift is another storage component that provides a highly available and scalable object storage service similar to Amazon S3. It enables storing and retrieving unstructured data objects using a RESTful API for both OpenStack services and instances running on the cloud.
Keystone serves as an identity service, providing authentication and authorization functions for the users in order to enable multi-tenancy. Keystone can be easily integrated with external identity systems, such as lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) or Active Directory.
OpenStack was originally launched in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA as an open source initiative that combined NASA’s Nebula platform and Rackspace’s Cloud Files platform.
Today, hundreds of companies contribute to OpenStack code, with many more playing a part in the broader community.
Canonical is the founding member of the foundation, official maintainer and publisher of OpenStack packages on Ubuntu, leader of the OpenStack Charms project and one the biggest contributor to OpenStack all the time.
There are thousands of OpenStack users across a broad range of industries. Particularly favoured for its stability, security and interoperability. Apart from telecommunications service providers, financial institutions, enterprises, governments, militaries, universities and research institutions all over the world, further adoption of OpenStack has been also seen in healthcare, retail and industrial.
Read how OpenStack helped SBI Group to optimise their CapEx and OpEx costs ›
According to the Research Market Monitor (Open Source Software, OpenStack) from September 2019, OpenStack’s combined market size worldwide is $7.7B. It also continues to be one of the top three open source projects in the world in terms of active contributions, along with the Linux kernel and Chromium. In 2020 OpenStack reached its 10-year anniversary which proves its maturity as a software project. Governed by the Open Infrastructure Foundation, more than 34,000 individual contributors and 550 companies participate in OpenStack development. It is also the most popular open source private cloud platform and its adoption continues to grow.
OpenStack allows organisations to bootstrap their own private cloud infrastructure, benefitting from maximum cost optimisation in multi-cloud environments.
All over the world, service providers use OpenStack as a foundation for network function virtualisation infrastructure (NFVI) implementation.
Although designed for traditional VMs, OpenStack is fully capable of provisioning bare metal machines on-demand too, turning your data centre into a bare metal cloud.
OpenStack can be easily extended with a container layer running on top of it for better workloads granularity as required by cloud-native applications.
Wondering which OpenStack platform to choose? This is why Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack is the answer:
Looking for the most straightforward installation instructions for OpenStacK?
MicroStack allows you to install a fully functional OpenStack on your workstation in just two commands. The entire process takes around twenty minutes.
Canonical's Charmed OpenStack is a pure upstream OpenStack distribution engineered for the best price-performance with full enterprise support.
Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution across public clouds, data centres and the edge with a built-in security and compliance for enterprise customers.
