Discover the benefits of using open source OpenStack IaaS Cloud Platform

In this article, we'll look at this open source platform OpenStack and see if it really is an open-source cloud operating system.

The idea behind the cloud and public infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is not very new. In fact, Amazon elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) has been six years old by this year. What has changed is that IaaS has now been used primarily as a private cloud computing to meet the enterprise computing with sensitive data. Private cloud computing applies the idea of IaaS to the private infrastructure. While this lacks the economic advantage of the public cloud (Pay-as-you-go service), it leverages the core principles of cloud computing to give the enterprise data center a scalable and resilient infrastructure.

Let's take a quick look at IaaS and its infrastructure before delving into this leading open source solution: OpenStack.

IaaS and cloud infrastructure

Cloud computing architectures often focus on a set of public resources that are exposed to the user on demand after virtualization. These resources include computing resources that vary in functionality, persistent storage resources, and configurable networking resources that combine these resources and expose them conditionally to the Internet.

The infrastructure implemented by IaaS (see Figure 1) follows such a model and adds other elements such as metering (for billing purposes to illustrate usage). The physical infrastructure is extracted from applications and users through a virtual layer implemented by a variety of technologies, including system management programs (for platform virtualization), virtual networks, and storage.

Figure 1. Advanced view of IaaS

Although OpenStack is one of the most popular open source cloud solutions available today, it is certainly not the first. In fact, OpenStack is a combination of two old solutions developed in both the public and private spheres.

Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for linking Your Programs to useful Bae (Eucalyptus), developed by a research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara is an earlier open source IaaS solution. Other solutions include Opennebula (an Open-source cloud-computing toolkit) and Nimbus (another open source toolbox for the IaaS Cloud). OpenStack integrates part of NASA's Nebula platform and Rackspace Cloud Files project (cloud storage).

The new comer of cloud computing: OpenStack

OpenStack, a newcomer to the IaaS space, was first released at the end of 2010. Although this solution is not mature enough and is less than two years old, OpenStack is now one of the most widely used cloud stacks. OpenStack is not a single solution, but a growing suite of open source solutions (including core and new hatching projects), and together form a powerful and mature IaaS stack.

As shown in Figure 2, OpenStack is built from several core technologies (more than what is shown here, but represents the key aspects shown here). On the left is the Deepwater dashboard, which shows a user interface that can be used by users and administrators to manage OpenStack services. Nova provides a scalable computing platform to support the configuration and management of a large number of servers and virtual machines (VMS, in a way that is not known in a hypervisor). Swift implements an object storage system that is internally redundant and scalable. At the bottom are Quantum and melange, both of which realize a network connection as a service (receptacle connectivity as a services). Finally, the Glance project implements a repository for virtual disk images (image as a service).

Figure 2. Core and add-on components of the OpenStack solution

As shown in Figure 2, OpenStack is a project collection that provides a complete IaaS solution. Table 1 shows these projects and their functioning aspects.

Table 1. OpenStack Projects and Components

Other important aspects include Keystone, which implements an identity service that is critical to the private cloud of the enterprise (management of computing servers, images within glance, and access to the Swift object store).