Stacked to Perfection

By Uchit Vyas

Over the years, IT infrastructure domain is moving from traditional way to IAAS (Infrastructure-As-A-Service). Many giant organizations have implemented IAAS based on OpenStack Cloud platform to build and run their native applications including infrastructure components like compute, storage, and networking. Rackspace and NASA are the pioneer contributors for OpenStack projects as NASA contributed their “Nebula” platform for compute resources and Rackspace contributed their “Cloud Files” for Object Storage.

Because of unique features of OpenStack making it very much adoptive and fast-evolving, Open Source project are known for their widely open platform based integrated solutions, user-friendly dashboards and flexibility.

OpenStack can fit with multiple environment based applications where it’s “dev” or “test” or “prod” environment because of its flexible components and simpler design. The core technologies beyond OpenStack combines an internally related projects with various parts including APIs, SDKs and CLIs for in-house or cloud environmental solutions and management of infrastructure. Moreover, almost all OpenStack APIs are extensible, that means you can keep compatibility with a core set of calls while giving access to more resources and innovating through API extensions endpoints.

The OpenStack project is widely adopted globally taking a collaborative approach of developers and cloud computing technologists. The OpenStack collaborative platform can be used for both public and private clouds.
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In recent times, Cloud and DevOps can be categorized in following categories in general:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Today, the most common issues persisting in the cloud world is to achieve agility, speed and service uptime up to 100%. All major data center solution provider companies are trying to become future ready next generation data center providers. Even in cloud, most of the public cloud vendors have expensive IT systems and have deployed over the years to achieve but in the next couple of years those systems will be out-of-date.

The major change for the new generation data centers have evolved the new model approach and adoption for the provisioning and deployment of new software and hardware. To handle the new age of cloud load, modern data centers have to enable multi-tenant model for scaling the approach. It is a huge step in the data center technology to shift the way of handling an entire infrastructure.

The next generation of Automation and DevOps for infrastructure has allowed system administrators and operators to deploy and deliver a fully automated infrastructure within a fraction of the time. The next generation data center and automation reduced the whole infrastructure components including storage, network, computing etc. as a single scalable and agile unit. So it's the administrator's responsibility to code the infrastructure as per environment requirements. To perform and adopt the next generation cloud mechanism where OpenStack comes as the ring-master here to support next generation data center Operating System. The ubiquitous influence of OpenStack has been felt by many global giant cloud enterprises like RackSpace, Red Hat, Cisco to name but a few. Nowadays most Cloud Services provider big giants run very large autoscaled private clouds based on OpenStack for their customers and internal units.

About the Author

Uchit Vyas is an IT industry veteran, a Cloud technologist at heart, and an Automation Solution Architect (Cloud and DevOps) at Opex Software, India. He is responsible for the delivery of solutions, services, and product development. He explores new open source technologies and defines the architecture, road maps, and best practices for enterprises. He has consulted on various tools and technologies, including Cloud computing, Big Data, Hadoop, ESB, Infrastructure automation (Chef/Puppet/Ansible), Java-based portals, and CMS technologies to Fortune 2000 companies around the world.

He has completed his engineering in computer science from Gujarat University. He worked as a senior associate at Infosys Limited in the Education and Research Team, during which time he worked on DevOps, Big Data analytics, Cloud security, and Virtualization.

He has also authored books on Mule ESB, AWS Development Essentials, Mastering AWS development, AWS DynamoDB and continues to write books on open source technologies.He hosts a blog named Cloud Magic World, where he posts tips and events about open source technologies.

This article is excerpted from Applied OpenStack Design Patterns by Uchit Vyas, ISBN: 978-1-4842-2453-3.