Today major requirement for most IT Companies is of cloud, but they don’t prefer public clouds due to security reasons, they basically want to set up their own cloud on their specific data centers, for example, companies like Ericsson, Vodafone. So Any Big Company wants its infrastructure cloud base without purchasing any kind of public cloud from the market. So these companies can put OpenStack on their infrastructure and can design their own cloud infrastructure and that’s it!.
It is basically a private cloud model which is open source, so anyone who is willing to have a cloud over its own hardware, then Openstack is the best option. As it provides all the features and principles which are given by the public cloud in the market.
Benefits:-
- Managing Infrastructure:- With Openstack anyone can easily manage infrastructure with their console in their own company.
- Volume:- Openstack provides volume , same as that of provided by public clouds.
- Machine:- Openstack provides creation of any kind of machine as per the requirement, same as provided by public clouds.
- Storage:- OpenStack offers unlimited storage pools and supports block-IO from a variety of vendors, as well as object file storage.
- Security:- Openstack provides high level of security ,through role-based access controls.
- Networking:- OpenStack Networking enables projects to create advanced virtual network topologies which may include services such as a firewall, a load balancer, and a virtual private network (VPN).
- High distribution and acceptance.
Components:-
It consists of several components with a flexible architecture, let’s see each one of them below:-
- Compute (Nova):- OpenStack Compute is a cloud computing fabric controller, which manages pools of computer resources and work with virtualization technologies, bare metals, and high-performance computing configurations. Nova’s architecture provides flexibility to design the cloud with no proprietary software or hardware requirements.
- Image Service (Glance):- OpenStack image service offers discovering, registering, and restoring virtual machine images.
- Object Storage (Swift):- OpenStack Swift creates redundant, scalable data storage to store petabytes of accessible data. It has a distributed architecture, providing greater redundancy, scalability, and performance, with no central point of control.
- Dashboard (Horizon):- Horizon is the authorized implementation of OpenStack’s Dashboard, which is the only graphical interface to automate cloud-based resources.
- Identity Service (Keystone):- It integrates with existing backend services such as LDAP while acting as a common authentication system across the cloud computing system.
- Networking (Neutron):- It ensures that the network is not a limiting factor in a cloud deployment and offers users with self-service ability over network configurations.
- Block Storage (Cinder):- OpenStack Cinder delivers determined block-level storage devices for application with OpenStack compute instances. A cloud user can manage their storage needs by integrating block storage volumes with Dashboard and Nova.
- Telemetry (Ceilometer):- Ceilometer delivers a single point of contact for billing systems obtaining all of the measurements to authorize customer billing across all OpenStack core components.
- Orchestration (Heat):- Heat is a service to orchestrate multiple composite cloud applications through both the CloudFormation-compatible Query API and OpenStack-native REST API, using the AWS CloudFormation template format.
Challanges:-
- OpenStack does not offer any sort of organized support. Unlike commercial solutions, there is no dedicated customer support.
- No centralized documentation, as it has different projects so it varies depending upon who created it.
- Upgradation is not that easy.
- There are too many vendors for it , due to which it has become a kind of crowded and slow to evolve.
- Installation is complex due to avalibility of different kinds of suite.
- As an open source comprehensive project, somewhere it is lacking real leadership.
Final Words:-
- Every component of OpenStack will be set up by the user only, designing as well controlling is handeled by user.
- Here, setup will be done by user, user’s hardware will be there, user’s planning will be there, also the installation is handled by the user itself.
Basically, he will be the admin of his own cloud.