Lomonosov Moscow State University

Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics

Department of Automation Systems of Computer Systems

OpenStack platform

Vasilenko Anatoly

521 group

Moscow, 2015

1. Contents

1 Contents 2

2 Introduction 3

3 Cloud computing 3

4 OpenStack capabilities 4

5 History 5

6 Governance 5

7 Components 5

7.1 Compute (Nova) 6

7.2 Image Service (Glance) 7

7.3 Object Storage (Swift) 7

7.4 Dashboard (Horizon) 8

7.5 Identity Service (Keystone) 8

7.6 Networking (Neutron) 8

7.7 Block Storage (Cinder) 9

7.8 Orchestration (Heat) 10

7.9 Telemetry (Ceilometer) 10

7.10 Database (Trove) 10

7.11 Elastic Map Reduce (Sahara) 11

7.12 Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) 11

7.13 Multiple Tenant Cloud Messaging (Zaqar) 11

7.14 Shared File System Service (Manila) 12

7.15 DNSaaS (Designate) 12

7.16 Security API (Barbican) 12

7.17 Components Relationships 13

8 Cloud Example 14

9 Deployment models 14

10 OpenStack Features 15

11 Conclusion 15

12 References 16

1. Introduction

OpenStack is a free and open-source cloud-computing software platform. Users primarily deploy it as an “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS), but it can be used to provide all three types of cloud computing services: IaaS, PaaS (“platform as a service”) and SaaS (“software as a service”).

The technology consists of a group of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources in a data center. Users can manage their resource using a web-based application, command-line tools or through a RESTful API, that supports JSON and XML formats. OpenStack was released under the terms of the Apache License, most of it has been written in Python.

OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and of NASA. Now it is a product managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. More than 500 companies have joined the project, including Arista Networks, AT&T, AMD, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Go Daddy, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Oracle, Pure Storage, Red Hat, and VMware. OpenStack project has its own site at www.openstack.org.

The OpenStack community collaborates around a six-month, time-based release cycle with frequent development milestones. During the planning phase of each release, the community gathers for an OpenStack Design Summit to facilitate developer working-sessions and to assemble plans.

The summit in May 2014 in Atlanta drew 4,500 attendees — a 50% increase from the Hong Kong Summit six months earlier.

1. Cloud computing

Cloud computing is a concept for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. Cloud computing provide users (people and companies) with various capabilities to store and process their data in third-party data centers. This is part of the concept of division of labour: sharing of resources to achieve synergy and economies of scale. At the basis of cloud computing is the concept of shared services.

Cloud computing, or “the cloud”, focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of the shared resources. Cloud resources are usually not only shared by multiple users but are also dynamically reallocated per demand. This approach helps maximize the use of computing power while reducing the overall cost of resources by using less electric power, air conditioning, rack space, replacement of broken details etc. to maintain the system. With cloud computing, multiple users can access a single server to retrieve and update their data without purchasing licenses for different applications, because people will pay not per user, but per installed instances of application.

The term "moving to cloud" also refers to an organization moving away from its own dedicated hardware to the use of a shared cloud infrastructure. This will decrease CAPEX, because the company does not need to buy hardware any more, and will not need to store it and spend money (OPEX) for its supporting when it is not in use.

The present availability of high-capacity networks, low-cost computers and storage devices as well as the widespread adoption of hardware virtualization, service-oriented architecture, and autonomic and utility computing have led to a growth in cloud computing. Companies can scale up if loading is increasing and then scale down again if the loading decrease. They can do it event very fast according to the daily changes. Cloud vendors are experiencing growth rates of 50% per year.

Cloud Computing increases following characteristics: agility/availability, lowering cost (reductions based on the division of labour), device and location independence, maintenance (for cloud computing it is much easier because of orchestration and dashboard systems), multitenancy, performance, productivity (resources can be accessed simultaneously), reliability (based on redundancy, which is much cheaper for clouds), scalability and security (can improve because of centralization of data, but it is harder to make secure distributed systems).

Cloud computing can handle three service models:

1. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is the name for services provided by companies in the form of physical or more often virtual machines. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.

2. Platform as a service (PaaS). In the PaaS models, cloud providers deliver a computing platform, typically including operating system, programming-language execution environment, database, and web server. Examples of such service are Google App Engine.

3. Software as a service (SaaS). Cloud providers manage the infrastructure and platforms that run the applications. SaaS is sometimes referred to as "on-demand software" and is usually priced on a pay-per-use basis or using a subscription fee. Often cloud users access the software from cloud clients. Examples of such services are GitHub project or Google Sheets.

Cloud can be one of three types: private (for internal use of organization), community (share infrastructure between several organizations with common concerns like security), public (for hosting services that will be opened to public), hybrid cloud (the composition of private, public or community clouds), distributed cloud, inter cloud and multi cloud.

1. OpenStack capabilities

OpenStack can manage different operating systems; can cooperate with different hypervisors and even Linux containers. The main goal of this project it to create community and open source product to manage clouds in all kinds of datacenters. In the world already exists some similar projects, but some of them are more specific for some purposes and some of them are not so well thought-out. Apart from OpenStack exists OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, AppScale, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Flexiant Limited, Nimbus, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, OpApp, Jelastic, PetiteCloud. In our days, the leader is Amazon Web Services provider, but its cloud platform is used for internal usage only.

Anyway, the Amazon platform is one of the best and one of the most widespread, so it will be good to take it into account, while developing OpenStack. OpenStack APIs are compatible with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 and thus client applications written for Amazon Web Services can be used with OpenStack with minimal porting effort. This is very important because it give a huge lift up for OpenStack on the way to conquer the world.

OpenStack is five-year old and already created its own ecosystem. There is many services around it, vendors, marketing, developers, meetups, conferences and other activities.

1. History

In July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched an open-source cloud-software initiative known as OpenStack. The OpenStack project intended to help organizations offer cloud-computing services running on standard hardware. The community's first official release, code-named Austin, appeared four months later, with plans to release regular updates of the software every few months. The early code came from NASA's Nebula platform as well as from Rackspace's Cloud Files platform.

In 2011, developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution adopted OpenStack with an unsupported technology preview of the OpenStack Bexar release for Ubuntu 11.04. Ubuntu's sponsor Canonical then introduced full support for OpenStack clouds, starting with OpenStack's Cactus release.

OpenStack became available in Debian Sid from the OpenStack "Cactus" release in 2011, and the first release of Debian including OpenStack was Debian 7.0 Wheezy, including OpenStack 2012.1 Essex.

And it started to grow up as a snowball:

1. In October 2011, SUSE announced the preview of the OpenStack.

2. In 2012, Red Hat announced a preview of their OpenStack distribution.

3. In July 2013, NASA announced that they are going to focus on the use of public clouds.

4. In December 2013, Oracle announced that it has joined OpenStack and will implement it in its products.

5. In May 2014, HP announced HP Helion and released a preview of HP Helion OpenStack Community.

6. At the 2014 Interop and Tech Field Day, software defined networking (SDN) was demonstrated in the context of using OpenStack, showing capabilities of automation.

The last one was one of the most important of all events, because it proves that OpenStack is a live project, which has its own place in our world and can be used jointly with other progressive IT technologies.

1. Governance

OpenStack is governed by a non-profit foundation and its board of directors, a technical committee and a user committee. The board of directors is made up of eight members from each of the eight platinum sponsors, eight members from the 24 defined maximum allowed Gold sponsors, and eight members elected by the Foundation individual members ^[14].

The Foundation's stated mission is “providing shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack Mission by Protecting, Empowering, and Promoting OpenStack software and the community around it, including users, developers and the entire ecosystem”. Though, it is not about the development of the software, which is managed by the technical committee – “an elected group that represents the contributors to the project, and has oversight on all technical matters” ^[15].

1. Components

OpenStack has a modular architecture with various code names for its components. This is one of its main benefits, because each component provide certain services. At the same time, components are isolated from each other and uses RESTful API for communication. Therefore, this leads us to very important abilities:

1. Separate development

2. API unification

3. Efficient utilization by user, because you can use only those components, which is required by your applications.

The core components of the OpenStack are Compute (Nova), Object and Block Storage (Swift and Cinder) and Networking (Neutron). These are services, which were needed for every instance of datacenter based on OpenStack.

OpenStack shared services are Identity service (Keystone), Image service (Glance), Telemetry service (Ceilometer), Orchestration service (Heat) and Database service (Trove). In addition, there is some other services exists in OpenStack project. The important point here is that new services can be added without essential changes to other services. It make a lot of space for a maneuver. Shared services (including identity, image management and a web interface) integrate the OpenStack components with each other as well as external systems to provide a unified view for users as they process different cloud resources.

After studying the developer pages of the OpenStack components, it was striking how non-overlapping the teams of developers are. I have seen it, because they form their code and write supporting information in different styles even within the scope of following the common pattern. This is one of the many examples, how module architecture work. Each command can concentrate on certain problem and solve it faster and better.

1. Compute (Nova)

OpenStack Compute (Nova) is a cloud computing fabric controller, which is the main part of an IaaS system, and enables service providers to offer on-demand computing resources, by managing large amounts of virtual machines. It is designed to manage and automate pools of computer resources and can work with widely available virtualization technologies (KVM, VMware, Xen, Hyper-V, LXC (Linux containers)), as well as bare metal and high-performance computing (HPC) configurations. KVM and XenServer are the most popular choices for hypervisor technology. LXC is supported for users who wish to minimize virtualization overhead and achieve greater performance, it is still not fully supported and have some particular drawbacks related to the Linux containers, but LXC is young technology and still in the process of active development. As Nova is used with different hypervisors, it makes no difference between software it is running, what is the part of the OpenStack flexibility. It even supports different hardware architectures.

It is written in Python, very comfortable programing language, but have many external libraries such as Eventlet, Kombu, and SQLAlchemy. Architecture is designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware with no proprietary hardware or software requirements and provide the ability to integrate with legacy systems and third-party technologies.