Every cloud platform requires a robust, reliable, scalable, and all-in-one storage solution that suffices all their workload requirements. Ceph has been emerging amazingly fast as a cloud storage solution, which seamlessly integrates with OpenStack and other cloud platforms. Ceph's unique, unified, and distributed architecture makes it the right choice for being a cloud storage backend.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Introduction to OpenStack
- Ceph – the best match for OpenStack
- Creating OpenStack environments
- Integrating Ceph and OpenStack
OpenStack is a free and open source software platform for building and managing public and private cloud computing platforms. It is governed by an independent, nonprofit foundation known as OpenStack foundation. It has the largest and most active community backed by technology giants such as HP, Red Hat, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Rackspace, and many more. OpenStack's idea for cloud is that it should be simple to implement and massively scalable.
OpenStack is considered as the cloud operating system that allows users to instantly deploy hundreds of virtual machines in an automated way. It also provides an efficient, hassle-free management of these machines. OpenStack is known for its dynamic scale up, scale out, and distributed architecture capabilities, making your cloud environment robust and future ready.
OpenStack provides the enterprise class Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for all your cloud needs. The following is the architecture of OpenStack:
OpenStack is made up of several different software components that work together to provide cloud services. The OpenStack community has identified nine key components that make the core part of OpenStack:
- Nova: This is the compute part that is designed to manage and automate pools of computer resources and can work with a variety of virtualization technologies such as QEMU/KVM, Xen, Hyper-VMware, bare metal, and Linux containers.
- Swift: This provides object storage facility to OpenStack.
- Cinder: This is the block storage component providing persistent volumes to OpenStack instances.
- Glance: This is the image service for OpenStack, which makes virtual machine deployment easy and quick.
- Neutron: This is the network component of OpenStack.
- Horizon: This is the dashboard for managing OpenStack.
- Keystone: This provides identity services to OpenStack and manages authentication for OpenStack.
- Ceilometer: This provides the telemetry service and allows cloud providers with billing and autoscaling services.
- Heat: This is the orchestration component of OpenStack.
Note
For more information on OpenStack, visit http://www.openstack.org/.