Red Hat OpenStack: Building and Managing Infrastructure

Red hat OpenStack provides a modular cloud infrastructure that operates on standard hardware, allowing you to conveniently deploy the necessary tools from a single platform whenever required.

What is Red hat OpenStack?

Red hat OpenStack is an open-source platform that utilizes shared virtual resources to construct and manage both private and public clouds. The components of the OpenStack platform, known as “projects,” handle fundamental cloud computing services such as computing, networking, storage, identity, and image services. Additionally, a range of optional projects can be combined to create customized and deployable cloud environments.

In the context of virtualization, resources like storage, CPU, and RAM are separated from specific vendor programs and partitioned by a hypervisor before being allocated as needed. OpenStack employs a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to further abstract these virtual resources into distinct pools, which power standard cloud computing tools directly interacted with by administrators and users.

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Is Red hat OpenStack just a virtualization management platform?

There are indeed many similarities between Red hat OpenStack and virtualization management platforms, but they are not identical.

While both OpenStack and virtualization management platforms operate on virtualized resources and can discover, report, and automate processes in different vendor environments, there are distinct differences between them.

Virtualization management platforms primarily focus on simplifying the manipulation of virtual resources, enabling easier control over their features and functions. On the other hand, OpenStack goes beyond that by utilizing virtual resources to implement a combination of tools. These tools work together to create a comprehensive cloud environment that aligns with the five criteria of cloud computing defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): network connectivity, pooled resources, a user interface, provisioning capabilities, and automatic resource control and allocation.

How does Red hat OpenStack work?

Red hat OpenStack is comprised of a collection of scripts, which are essentially sets of commands. These scripts are organized into packages known as projects, which handle the execution of tasks involved in creating cloud environments. To facilitate the creation of these environments, OpenStack depends on two additional types of software:

• Virtualization creates a layer of virtual resources abstracted from hardware
• A base operating system (OS) that carries out commands given by OpenStack scripts

Consider it this way: OpenStack doesn’t directly perform resource virtualization; instead, it utilizes virtualized resources to construct cloud environments. Moreover, OpenStack doesn’t directly execute commands; instead, it forwards them to the underlying operating system. These three technologies—OpenStack, virtualization, and the base operating system—must collaborate effectively. This interdependence is why many OpenStack clouds are deployed using Linux® since it served as the inspiration for RackSpace and NASA to release OpenStack as open-source software.

The OpenStack components

OpenStack’s architecture consists of multiple open-source projects that are utilized to establish the undercloud and overcloud. The under-cloud is managed by system administrators and serves as the foundation for setting up and managing the OpenStack environments of end users, known as overclouds.

Within the architecture, there are six stable core services responsible for computing, networking, storage, identity, and images. Additionally, there are over a dozen optional services that may vary in terms of developmental maturity. These core services form the infrastructure that enables the remaining projects to handle functions such as dashboarding, orchestration, bare-metal provisioning, messaging, containers, and governance.

• Nova is a full management and access tool to OpenStack compute resources—handling scheduling, creation, and deletion.
• Neutron connects the networks across other OpenStack services.
• Swift is a highly fault-tolerant object storage service that stores and retrieves unstructured data objects using a RESTful API.
• Cinder provides persistent block storage accessible through a self-service API.
• Keystone authenticates and authorizes all OpenStack services. It’s also the endpoint catalog for all services.
• Glance stores and retrieves virtual machine disk images from a variety of locations.

What can I do with OpenStack?

Private clouds

IDC conducted an evaluation of the value offered by the Red Hat OpenStack Platform for private clouds and determined that organizations achieved annual benefits of $6.81 million. This demonstrates that private cloud distributions operating on OpenStack can deliver more significant advantages compared to privately built clouds using custom code.

Network functions virtualization

According to 451 Research, the adoption of OpenStack for network functions virtualization (NFV), which involves the separation and distribution of key network functions across various environments, has the potential to be a major trend. The analyst’s survey reveals that virtually every global communications services provider has included NFV using OpenStack on their agenda.

Public clouds

OpenStack is the primary choice for organizations seeking an open-source solution to build public cloud environments. Regardless of whether your company is a large publicly traded enterprise or a startup, OpenStack empowers you to establish public clouds equipped with services that rival those offered by major public cloud providers.

Containers

OpenStack provides a reliable base for both public and private clouds. Containers enhance the speed of application delivery while simplifying their deployment and management. By running containers on OpenStack, the advantages of containers can be extended from individual teams to encompass broader enterprise operations across different departments.

Why Red Hat OpenStack?

Red Hat ensures the stability of OpenStack for enterprise environments while preserving its open-source nature. By keeping OpenStack open source, you have complete control over the cloud infrastructure and all its associated components. With Red Hat® OpenStack, you can customize the deployment to integrate with any vendor or choose to work independently, as the code is not confined within proprietary boundaries—it belongs to you. Additionally, they collaborate closely with cloud providers to ensure optimal performance, regardless of the infrastructure you deploy.

However, their commitment goes beyond providing products, support, consulting, and training. Red Hat strives to be your partner in fostering an open-source culture within your enterprise.

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