Openstack 101

© 2013 Cloud Technology Partners, Inc.
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OpenStack 101
Technology Introduction
Boston OpenStack Meetup
June 25th, 2013

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Theme: An Open Source Cloud Computing
“Is OpenStack the new Linux?
Or is this open source 'cloud operating system' just a launching
pad for a million new cloud businesses? Either way, the
excitement is contagious”
Oliver Rist,
InfoWorld

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• What is OpenStack?
– A brief history
– The OpenStack Foundation
• The OpenStack projects
– Compute: Nova, Glance
– Storage – Swift, Cinder
– Networks: Quantum
– Tools: Horizon, Ceilometer, Heat
– Security: Keystone
• Pulling it all together
• Deploying OpenStack
Agenda
Like Linux, OpenStack aims to provide a
kernel around which all kinds of software
vendors can build businesses. But with
OpenStack, we're talking multiple
projects. It's hugely ambitious, perhaps
the most far-reaching open source
project ever, although still at a very early
stage.

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● Open Source Cloud software
● Launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010
● Massively scalable
● Managed by the OpenStack Foundation
● Rapidly taking over the Cloud world!
Quick Start for the Terminally Busy…
What is OpenStack?

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A Brief History
• Jointly founded in July 2010 by
Rackspace and NASA with merger
of two projects:
– Swift object storage based on
Rackspace's Cloud Files platform
– Nova based on Nebula compute
platform
• Fastest growing Open Source
project to date!
Strong Community Support
• Red Hat
• Rackspace
• IBM
• HP
• Intel
• Vmware (through Nicira)
• Canonical (Ubuntu)
• Cloudscaling
• And several hundred more…
What is OpenStack?

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• Releases are timed to
correspond with the
developer Summit meeting
• Currently no reliable
upgrade paths between
releases
• Expect large deltas between
releases for the next year or
so as new features and core
functionality are added
Six Month Cycle – Currently working on Havana
OpenStack Project Release History

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• Independent home for OpenStack with more than $10 million in funding
• Uses the Apache licensing model
• Serves developers, users, and the entire ecosystem by providing:
– Shared resources
– Enable technology vendors targeting the platform
• Individual membership is free and accessible to anyone
An Open Source Foundation
What is OpenStack?

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• Open source software for building private and public clouds
– Designed for flexibility and many different use cases
– Mix and match components
– Kit of administrative tools
• Enables multi-tenancy
– Quota for different users
– Users can be associated with multiple tenants
• Provides virtual machines (VM) on demand
– Self service provisioning
– Snapshotting capability
• Storage volumes
– Block storage for VM images
– Object storage for VM images and arbitrary files
Open Source Cloud Platform
What is OpenStack?

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OpenStack: The Open Source Cloud Operating System

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High Level Architecture - Grizzly
Adapted from : http://26a0ff8ca8ba32139f7d-db711c577a50b6bdc946ea71aaca027d.r97.cf1.rackcdn.com/openstack-conceptual-arch-folsom.jpg
Horizon
Nova Networking
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift

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An Open Source Set of Cloud Technologies
What is OpenStack?
• Compute (codenamed "Nova") provides virtual servers upon demand.
• Image (codenamed "Glance") provides a catalog and repository for virtual
disk images. These disk images are mostly commonly used in OpenStack
Compute.
• Dashboard (codenamed "Horizon") provides a modular web-based user
interface for all the OpenStack services. Used to perform most operations
like launching an instance, assigning IP addresses and setting access
controls.
• Identity (codenamed "Keystone") provides authentication and
authorization for all the OpenStack services. It also provides a service
catalog of services within a particular OpenStack cloud.
• Object Store (codenamed "Swift") provides object storage. It allows you to
store or retrieve files (but not mount directories like a fileserver).
• Block Storage (codenamed "Cinder") provides persistent block storage to
guest VMs.
• Network (codenamed “Quantum") provides "network connectivity as a
service" between interface devices managed by other OpenStack services.

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OpenStack Overall Architecture - Compute
Horizon
Quantum
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift

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• OpenStack Compute is a tool to orchestrate a cloud, including
running instances, managing networks, and controlling access to the
cloud through users and projects.
• The underlying open source project's name is Nova, and it provides
the software that can control an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
cloud computing platform.
• It is similar in scope to Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud Servers.
• OpenStack Compute does not include any virtualization software;
rather it defines drivers that interact with underlying virtualization
mechanisms that run on a host operating system, and exposes
functionality over a web-based API.
OpenStack Nova Compute - Introduction

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OpenStack Nova Compute – Message Queue
Nova-compute is a worker daemon, which primarily creates and
terminates VMs via hypervisor API.

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OpenStack Nova Compute – Message Queue
Nova-compute is a worker daemon, which primarily creates and
terminates VMs via hypervisor API.
Nova-
compute
libvirt
XEN
VM
VM
VMware
VM
VM
KVM
VM
VM
XEN
VM
VM
QEMU
VM
VM
LXC
VM
VM

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• The process for selecting a hypervisor usually means prioritizing and
making decisions based on budget and resource constraints as well
as the list of supported features and required technical
specifications.
– Most development is done on KVM and Xen-based hypervisors
• With OpenStack Compute, you can orchestrate clouds using multiple
hypervisors in different zones.
– KVM - Kernel-based Virtual Machine
– LXC - Linux Containers (through libvirt)
– QEMU - Quick EMUlator
– UML - User Mode Linux
– VMWare ESX/ESXi 4.1 update 1
– Xen - Xen, Citrix XenServer and Xen Cloud Platform (XCP)
– Bare Metal - Provisions physical hardware via pluggable sub-drivers.
OpenStack Nova Compute – Supported Hypervisors

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Glance
OpenStack Overall Architecture – Image Store
Horizon
Quantum
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift

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• The Glance project provides services for discovering, registering, and
retrieving virtual machine images. Glance has a RESTful API that allows
querying of VM image metadata as well as retrieval of the actual image
• Basically a database and some tools
• VM images made available through Glance can be stored in a variety of
locations:
– Simple filesystems like ZFS, LVM, etc.
– Direct attached storage
– Object-storage systems like OpenStack Swift project or S3
– Block storage like OpenStack Cinder project
Glance
OpenStack Glance – Introduction

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OpenStack Glance – Reference Architecture

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Horizon
OpenStack Overall Architecture - Dashboard
Horizon
Quantum
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift

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Horizon
• Provides a baseline user interface
for managing OpenStack Services
– Stateless
– Error handling is delegated to back-
end
– Doesn’t support all API functions
– Can use memcached or database to
store sessions
– Gets updated via nova-api polling
Basic Operations
• From UI
– Login in to Horizon
– Specify parameters of VM in “create
VM” form
– Hit “create” button
• Under the Hood
– Form parameters are converted to
Post data
– “Create” request initiates HTTP
POST request to back-end
• To Keystone if authorization token is
not cached
• To nova-api if authorization token
has not yet expired
OpenStack Horizon Dashboard – Introduction

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OpenStack Horizon Dashboard – Reference Architecture
Horizon
End Users
Administrators

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OpenStack Horizon Dashboard – Example

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Keystone
OpenStack Overall Architecture - Security
Adapted from : http://26a0ff8ca8ba32139f7d-db711c577a50b6bdc946ea71aaca027d.r97.cf1.rackcdn.com/openstack-conceptual-arch-folsom.jpg
Horizon
Quantum
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift

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• Keystone provides a single point of integration for OpenStack policy,
catalog, token and authentication.
– Keystone handles API requests as well as providing configurable catalog,
policy, token and identity services.
• Communicates via OpenStack Identity API (version 2)
• Each Keystone function has a pluggable backend which allows
different ways to use the particular service.
– Standard backends include LDAP or SQL, as well as Key Value Stores
(KVS).
• Most commonly used in delegated authorization deployments
• Most people will use this as a point of customization for their
current authentication services.
OpenStack Security - Keystone Introduction

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Keystone relationship to other OpenStack Elements

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• The Identity service has two primary functions:
– User management: keep track of users and what they are permitted to
do
– Service catalog: Provide a catalog of what services are available and
where their API endpoints are located
• User management
– Users - Represents a human user, and has associated information such
as username, password and email.
– Tenants - A project, group, or organization. Must specify a tenant to
make requests to OpenStack services
– Roles - Captures what operations a user is permitted to perform in a
given tenant.
OpenStack Security - Keystone Basic Concepts
$ keystone user-create --name=alice --pass=mypassword123 --email=alice@example.com
$ keystone tenant-create --name=acme
$ keystone role-create --name=compute-user

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OpenStack Security - Keystone Architecture Flow

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Swift and Cinder
OpenStack Overall Architecture - Storage
Horizon
Quantum
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift

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• Storage is found in many parts of the OpenStack stack, and the
differing types can cause confusion to even experienced cloud
engineers.
OpenStack Storage - Introduction
On-instance / ephemeral Volumes block storage (Cinder) Object Storage (Swift)
Used for running Operating System
and scratch space
Used for adding additional
persistent storage to a virtual
machine (VM)
Used for storing virtual machine
images and data
Persists until VM is terminated Persists until deleted Persists until deleted
Access associated with a VM Access associated with a VM Available from anywhere
Implemented as a filesystem
underlying OpenStack Compute
Mounted via OpenStack Block-
Storage controlled protocol (for
example, iSCSI)
REST API
Administrator configures size
setting, based on flavors
Sizings based on need Easily scalable for future growth
Example: 10GB first disk, 30GB/core
second disk
Example: 1TB "extra hard drive"
Example: 10s of TBs of dataset
storage

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OpenStack Storage - Concepts

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• The two common use cases for providing object storage in a
compute cloud are:
– To provide users with a persistent
storage mechanism
– As a scalable, reliable data store
for virtual machine images
OpenStack Storage - Uses

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OpenStack Storage - Swift Key Features

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Unique as possible data storage
OpenStack Storage - Swift Architecture
Disk
Server/Node
Zone
Multiple zones
make up a Region

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• The Ring
– Maps names to entities (accounts, containers, objects) on disk
– Uses MD5 hashing for object tags
– Stores data on zones, devices, nodes and replicas
– Weights can be used to balance the distribution of partitions and nodes
– Used by proxy server and storage nodes
• Proxy Server
– Exposes the public API
– Makes routing requests: read, write, modify, etc.
• Object Server
– Blob storage server
– Uses xattrs, binary format
– Object location based on path from name hash and timestamp
OpenStack Storage - Swift System Components

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• Services run completely autonomously
• Designed for generic hardware
• Proxy Services - More CPU and network I/O intensive. If you are using
10g networking to the proxy, or are terminating SSL traffic at the proxy,
greater CPU power will be required.
• Object, Container, and Account Services (Storage Services) are more
disk and network I/O intensive.
• The easiest deployment is to install all services on each server
– Scales each service out horizontally.
– If you need more throughput to either Account or Container Services, they
may each be deployed to their own servers. For example you might use faster
(but more expensive) SAS or even SSD drives to get faster disk I/O to the
databases.
Main services
OpenStack Storage - Swift System Components

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OpenStack Storage – Cinder Architecture

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• Cinder separates out the persistent block storage functionality that was previously
part of OpenStack Compute into its own service.
• The OpenStack Block Storage API allows for manipulation of volumes, volume types
(similar to compute flavors) and volume snapshots.
– cinder-api accepts API requests and routes them to cinder-volume for action.
– cinder-volume acts upon the requests by reading or writing to the Cinder database to
maintain state, interacting with other processes (like cinder-scheduler) through a message
queue and directly upon block storage providing hardware or software.
– It can interact with a variety of storage providers through a driver architecture.
– Available drivers: IBM, SolidFire, NetApp, Nexenta, Zadara, linux iSCSI and other storage
providers.
– Much like nova-scheduler, the cinder-scheduler daemon picks the optimal block storage
provider node to create the volume on.
• Cinder deployments will also make use of a messaging queue to route information
between the cinder processes as well as a database to store volume state.
• Like Quantum, Cinder will mainly interact with Nova, providing volumes for its
instances.
Cinder Block Storage
OpenStack Storage – Cinder Introduction

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OpenStack Overall Architecture - Network
Horizon
Quantum
Cinder
Keystone
Nova
Glance Swift
Quantum – Software Defined Networking

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• Quantum is an OpenStack project to provide "networking as a service"
between interface devices (e.g., vNICs) managed by other OpenStack
services (e.g., nova).
• Starting in the Folsom release, Quantum is a core and supported part of
the OpenStack platform
Quantum Network
OpenStack Network – Quantum Introduction

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Sample Deployment Model
OpenStack Network - Quantum Deployment

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Plugin and Agent Summary
OpenStack Network - Quantum Architecture

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OpenStack Architecture – Putting it all together

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Putting it all together:
Large Cloud Implementation Case

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• A $3B global electronics company
• Building a cloud in support of its consumer
division activities
• Major issues
• Little in-house cloud expertise
• Relying on immature cloud technology
• Weak middle management support for
project
Organization
• Build an organizational cloud to support millions
of external customers
• Create an IT organization to support the cloud infrastructure
• Provide a platform for building future applications
Goals
As-Is Situation
OpenStack Deployment Case Study

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• Independent network requirements for physical server nodes and
virtual machines (VM)
• Need to isolate VM networking information from the core network for
scaling
• Many components interact at different levels of the system stack adds
complexity
• Need to isolate networks and separate functions for security
• Separate networks by function for traffic shaping
• Complex data paths – Data between VM’s, East/West and in and out of
the system, North/South
• OpenStack has a weak high availability architecture
Network Architecture Requirements
OpenStack Cloud Deployment Case Study

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Layer 3 with Virtual Networking
Cloud Backbone Network
Nova Compute Node 1 Nova Compute Node 2
iSCSI SAN
VM VM’s
192.168.1.5 192.168.2.5
Eth 192.168.1.5
Tapx/10.10.2.x
Virtual Switch
EBGP/30
182.196.0.255
0.0.0.0/0
182.196.0.0/22
Virtual Switch
Cloud Network Edge
Virtual Switch
Suwon Network Edge
Node 1
VM view
EBGP/30
Eth0 192.168.8.5
Eth1/182.196.0.100
Eth0 192.168.9.10
Tap0/182.196.2.7
Private AS eg. AS64512
Eth1/182.196.0.101
192.168.2.7
iSCSI SAN
192.168.1.7
182.196.0.1

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Deployment Automation Network Diagram
Combined
Server
Stage 2: Build Crowbar
server on Management
network and automate
deployment process for
Swift and Nova nodes.
IPMI configured
IPMI configured
Need VPN access to
deployment servers
and nodes

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• Think holistically
• Top management needs to actively support cross organizational change
• Focus on building in-house expertise in cloud:
– Architecture
– Networking
– Applications
– Data center operations
• Use the rack as the base unit for scaling
• Scale the cloud horizontally, not vertically
• Automate, automate, automate!
Advice from the Trenches

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Havana Architecture

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• Metering (Ceilometer): Central collection fro metering/monitoring
data
– Example: Collect usage information for billing systems
• Orchestration (Heat): Template-based orchestration engine for
OpenStack
– Example: Developers define application deployment patterns
• LBaaS: Load Balancer server connected to Quantum
– Expect to see more plugins and ecosystem activity
• Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) incubator project
• Havana Release Features and
Status: http://wiki.openstack.org/releasestatus/
OpenStack Havana Roadmap Highlights

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• Integrated Projects (Havana release)
– OpenStack Compute (nova): https://launchpad.net/nova
– OpenStack Object Storage (swift): https://launchpad.net/swift
– OpenStack Image Service (glance): https://launchpad.net/glance
– OpenStack Identity (keystone): https://launchpad.net/keystone
– OpenStack Dashboard (horizon): https://launchpad.net/horizon
– OpenStack Networking (quantum): https://launchpad.net/quantum
– OpenStack Block Storage service (cinder): https://launchpad.net/cinder
– Ceilometer: https://launchpad.net/ceilometer
– Heat: https://launchpad.net/heat
• Incubated Projects (Havana release)
– Trove – Formerly Reddwarf, Database as a Service for Open Stack.
– Ironic - Bare metal hypervisor API and a set of plugins which interact with the
bare metal hypervisors. By default, it will use PXE and IPMI in concert to
provision and turn on/off machines
Havana Official Projects

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• Related - unofficial projects with no rights to use OpenStack brand and
assets or project resources
• TripleO - vision that Openstack can be used to deploy Openstack at a
massive scale
• Designate - provides DNS-as-a-service for OpenStack
• Marconi - message queueing service
• Savanna - easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters on OpenStack
• Murano - allow a non-experienced user to deploy reliable Windows
based environments in a “push-the-button” manner
• Convection - TaskSystem-as-a-Service project for cloud workloads
Unofficial/related Projects
OpenStack Havana Incubator Projects

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• http://www.openstack.org/ - Main site
• http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-
compute/admin/content/ch_getting-started-with-openstack.html
• http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack-compute/admin/bk-compute-
adminguide-trunk.pdf - Current OpenStack computer Administration
Manual – Dec 18, 2012
• http://www.openstack.org/software/start/ - How To Get Started With
OpenStack
• https://github.com/mseknibilel/OpenStack-Folsom-Install-
guide/blob/master/OpenStack_Folsom_Install_Guide_WebVersion.rst -
OpenStack Folsom Install Guide
• http://www.packtpub.com/openstack-cloud-computing-cookbook/book -
• OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook
• http://www.openstack.org/blog/tag/training/ - Tag: Training
Additional Resources

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OpenStack 101 Technology
Introduction
Questions?

Openstack 101

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