OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system, that provides cloud functionality to your hardware, that can be your laptop or any bare-metal hardware. It offers a couple of cloud services like VM, networking, storage, image services, identity, and many more.
You can establish your Infrastructure as a service cloud model with the help of OpenStack and It gives you complete control over the cloud computation. You already know most of the platforms available in the market, which helps in virtualization and cloud computation but they all are expensive and licensed. like AWS, azure GCP.
We can install OpenStack free of cost and can be customized with the required services according to the need. Hence It is open-source so many corporations own their version of OpenStack. Many big-shot companies in the IT world like Red Hat have adopted OpenStack on their cloud management.
History
OpenStack was created in 2010 as a joint open-source initiative between Rackspace Hosting and NASA to enable cloud computing services to run on standard hardware.
Maintained by The OpenStack Foundation, It is a non-profit organization that oversees both development and community-building around the projects.
Benefits of OpenStack
- Open-source
It is open-source, all OpenStack projects are completely free and source code available on GitHub so many companies are contributing to the OpenStack like Redhat, etc and you can also contribute to the OpenStack. - Orchestration
It provides an Orchestration service. It’s a template-based orchestration for describing a cloud application by running its API calls to generate running cloud applications. Using these templates you can create most of the OpenStack resource types such as instances, floating IPs, volumes, security groups, and users and It also provides advanced functionality such for instance high availability, instance auto-scaling, and nested stacks. - Cloud Models
It provides you an Infrastructure as a service cloud model so you can establish both private or public cloud using it. - Scalability
It is designed to be horizontally scalable. Rather than switching to larger servers, you procure more servers and simply install identically configured services. You can easily scale in or out your resources and also load balance among the services. - Security
It provides you the Rollback access control for security, you can restrict the user access as per the need, also It internal components communications are very secure. - Dashboard
It also provides you a rich user-friendly dashboard to play across the resources easily, you can do administration work as well as development work like manages resources from the dashboard.
What OpenStack is not?
Hypervisor
Many peoples confusing about that is OpenStack is a hypervisor tool like KVM, VMWare, etc, so the answer is no open stack is not a hypervisor but it uses a hypervisor to create a virtual machine, By default, It is using KVM, but you can use other hypervisors as well.
Single Project
Openstack is not a single project so there are lots of projects in it, like nova, glance, cinder, etc each project have its objectives for example cinder project provide us the block storage service and glance provide us the image service
Product
Openstack is not a product it is a platform where you can build your own private or public cloud.
Architecture
OpenStack Core Services
- Nova
Nova is responsible for computing service to spin up the new virtual machine, By default, it uses the KVM hypervisor for the virtual machine or you can use your hypervisor as well. - Cinder
It is the Block Storage service for providing volumes to Nova virtual machines, Ironic bare metal hosts, containers, and more. - Neutron
It provides networking as a service for your IAAS infrastructure, provides virtual networks, subnet, security groups, etc. - Glance
Glance us an Image Service Project, that stores os images and their metadata, or image storage you can use s3, swift and many more storage. - Swift
Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store. Organizations can use Swift to store lots of data efficiently, safely, and cheaply. - Keystone
Keystone provides API client authentication, service discovery, and distributed multi-tenant authorization by implementing OpenStack’s Identity API. - Horizon
Horizon is the canonical implementation of OpenStack’s Dashboard, which provides a web based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, etc.
AWS vs OpenStack
Deployment Tools
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