Article by Sanjeev
OpenStack is a kind of tool that is basically used to manage various resources in a cloud platform. In this article, we will find out more about OpenStack. We will discuss:
- What is OpenStack?
- Why Openstack?
OpenStack is an open-source software.
The main purpose behind OpenStack is to help companies in managing their cloud platform.
OpenStack provides an interface where the companies will be able to design their infrastructure as they want.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system where is it will provide you the computing, networking and storage resources. It also offers you a virtual machine so you can use it for various tasks as you want.
Openstack is used as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
You can use the OpenStack interface to manage several resources or you can use the rest API to manage things in OpenStack. Over 500 top companies joined their hands to enhance this project.
Key points about Openstack:
- Open Source software
- Used for managing public and private clouds
- Helps in configuring cloud components like compute (CPU, RAM), storage and networking
- Offers IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
- Users can easily manage cloud components including virtual machines and software deployment
- Users can monitor the services via a simple dashboard
Openstack Components
OpenStack is made up of various component and each component has its own use in the software stack. Let’s discuss the components in OpenStack:
Image credit Openstack.org
Horizon: The front of the stack. An interface to manage rest of the services. Horizon is the dashboard panel of OpenStack.
Nova: It helps in setting up VMs (Virtual Machines) and scalability. It is used to maintain the servers, test and development environments and much more.
Cinder: It provides block-storage. The block-storage can be maintained by the OpenStack administrator and Nova.
Neutron: It provides the flexibility to use different networking services for OpenStack.
Glance: Users can save, restore and manage virtual machines as per their usage. Glance offers a client-server architecture and it also provides API through which you can access different kind of information like metadata of VMs.
Swift: It creates a redundant data storage. It can be accessible any time like in case of system recovery, to improve performance, reliability. It helps organizations in data replication, scaling up or down as needed.
Keystone: Keystone is where user authentication takes places. Here you will see a list of users and the services they are using.
Why OpenStack?
There are so many reasons why you should use OpenStack as your cloud management software. Here, I have listed a few of them:
- Scaling: Scalability and flexibility are more important for the companies who are using the Cloud Computing systems. Sometimes end users might start searching a lot of data on your application or software. In that case, you might need to increase infrastructure components resources like storage, CPU, RAM and the networking capacity of your application, so that your application or software will not go down and users will be able to access whenever they need.
OpenStack offers a very easy and smooth web-based dashboard through which an administrator can easily scale up or down as per infrastructure’s need. - Automation: OpenStack is built using the programming language Python. OpenStack offers rest API that you can use to build things on the top of OpenStack infrastructure. It provides the capability to automate those repeatable processes.
- Faster Development: Because OpenStack is a completely free to use software, many developers from the world’s top companies are contributing to this stack. Companies like IBM, Dell, Intel etc, made modules for themselves. There are many companies who develop modules for themselves and later share these with the open-source community.
- Huge Community Support: For any software or programming language, the community adoption and support is really important. OpenStack was developed in 2009. The software is a decade old and has a huge supportive community.
