OpenStack
OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.
OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA., it was managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. By 2018, more than 500 companies had joined the project. In 2020 the foundation announced it would be renamed the Open Infrastructure Foundation in 2021.
History
In July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA announced an open-source cloud-software initiative known as OpenStack. The mission statement was "to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable".The project intended to help organizations offer cloud-computing services running on standard hardware. The community's first official release, code-named Austin, appeared three months later on, 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. The cloud stack and open stack modules were merged and released as open source by the NASA Nebula team in concert with Rackspace.
In 2011, developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution adopted OpenStack with an unsupported technology preview of the OpenStack "Bexar" release for Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". 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, including OpenStack 2012.1.
In October 2011, SUSE announced the public preview of the industry's first fully configured OpenStack powered appliance based on the "Diablo" OpenStack release. In August 2012, SUSE announced its commercially supported enterprise OpenStack distribution based on the "Essex" release.
In 2012, Red Hat announced a preview of their OpenStack distribution, beginning with the "Essex" release. After another preview release, Red Hat introduced commercial support for OpenStack with the "Grizzly" release, in July 2013.
The OpenStack organization has grown rapidly and is supported by more than 540 companies.
In 2012 NASA withdrew from OpenStack as an active contributor, and instead made the strategic decision to use Amazon Web Services for cloud-based services. In July 2013, NASA released an internal audit citing lack of technical progress and other factors as the agency's primary reason for dropping out as an active developer of the project and instead focus on the use of public clouds. This report is contradicted in part by remarks made by Ames Research Center CIO, Ray O'Brien. As of Nov 2021, NASA continues to utilize OpenStack in IAAS and PAAS support of the Discover supercomputer cluster. The OpenStack environment is called "Explore" and operates in the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center.
Notable deployments
In November 2012, The UK's Government Digital Service launched Inside Government based on the OpenNASA v2.0 Government as a Platform model.In December 2013, Oracle announced it had joined OpenStack as a Sponsor and planned to bring OpenStack to Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, and many of its products. It followed by announcing Oracle OpenStack distributions for Oracle Solaris and for Oracle Linux using Icehouse on 24 September 2014.
In May 2014, HP announced HP Helion and released a preview of HP Helion OpenStack Community, beginning with the IceHouse release. HP has operated HP Helion Public Cloud on OpenStack since 2012.
At the 2014 Interop and Tech Field Day, software-defined networking was demonstrated by Avaya using Shortest path bridging and OpenStack as an automated campus, extending automation from the data center to the end device, and removing manual provisioning from service delivery.
, NASA hosts the Explore OpenStack private cloud in support of the Discover HPC.
, China Mobile uses OpenStack as the foundation of its 5G network. Red Hat claims that its platform is deployed on over 30 percent of production LTE networks.
The OpenStack cloud at CERN requires over 300,000 cores to meet the needs of the Large Hadron Collider.
Historical names
Several OpenStack projects changed names due to trademark issues.- Neutron was formerly known as Quantum.
- Sahara used to be called Savanna.
- Designate was previously known as Moniker.
- Trove was formerly known as RedDwarf.
- Zaqar was formerly known as Marconi.
Release history
OpenStack development
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 would gather for an OpenStack Design Summit to facilitate developer working sessions and to assemble plans. These Design Summits would coincide with the OpenStack Summit conference.
Starting with the Pike development cycle the design meetup activity has been separated out into a separate Project Teams Gathering event. This was done to avoid the developer distractions caused by presentations and customer meetings that were happening at the OpenStack Summit and to allow the design discussions to happen ahead of the start of the next cycle.
Recent OpenStack Summits have taken place in Shanghai on 4–6 November 2019, Denver on 29 April-1 May 2019, Berlin on 13–19 November 2018, Vancouver on 21–25 May 2018, Sydney on 6–8 November 2017, Boston on 8–11 May 2017, Austin on 25–29 April 2016, and Barcelona on 25–28 October 2016. Earlier OpenStack Summits have taken place also in Tokyo in October 2015, Vancouver in May 2015, and Paris in November 2014. The summit in May 2014 in Atlanta drew 4,500 attendees – a 50% increase from the Hong Kong summit six months earlier.
Components
OpenStack has a modular architecture with various code names for its components.Compute (Nova)
Nova is the OpenStack project that provides a way to provision compute instances as virtual machines, real hardware servers, and has limited support for system containers. Nova runs as a set of daemons on top of existing Linux servers to provide that service.Nova is written in Python. It uses many external Python libraries such as Eventlet, Kombu, and SQLAlchemy. Nova is designed to be horizontally scalable. Rather than switching to larger servers, you procure more servers and simply install identically configured services.
Due to its widespread integration into enterprise-level infrastructures, monitoring OpenStack performance in general, and Nova performance in particular, scaling became an increasingly important issue. Monitoring end-to-end performance requires tracking metrics from Nova, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Swift and other services, in addition to monitoring RabbitMQ which is used by OpenStack services for message passing. All these services generate their own log files, which, especially in enterprise-level infrastructures, also should be monitored.
Networking (Neutron)
Neutron is an OpenStack project to provide "network connectivity as a service" between interface devices managed by other OpenStack services. It implements the OpenStack Networking API.It manages all networking facets for the Virtual Networking Infrastructure and the access layer aspects of the Physical Networking Infrastructure in the OpenStack environment. OpenStack Networking enables projects to create advanced virtual network topologies which may include services such as a firewall, and a virtual private network.
Neutron allows dedicated static IP addresses or DHCP. It also allows Floating IP addresses to let traffic be dynamically rerouted.
Users can use software-defined networking technologies like OpenFlow to support multi-tenancy and scale. OpenStack networking can deploy and manage additional network services—such as intrusion detection systems, load balancing, firewalls, and virtual private networks.
Block storage (Cinder)
Cinder is the OpenStack Block Storage service for providing volumes to Nova virtual machines, Ironic bare metal hosts, containers and more. Some of the goals of Cinder are to be/have:- Component based architecture: Quickly add new behaviors
- Highly available: Scale to very serious workloads
- Fault-Tolerant: Isolated processes avoid cascading failures
- Recoverable: Failures should be easy to diagnose, debug, and rectify
- Open Standards: Be a reference implementation for a community-driven api