Using OpenStack in the Real World: Part 1: Understanding the Lay of the Land

Here at Mirantis we do a lot of content about theoretical or deeply technical (but important) topics, such as OpenStack Networking Tutorial: Single-host FlatDHCPManager or How to Migrate an Instance with Zero Downtime: OpenStack Live Migration with KVM Hypervisor and NFS Shared Storage.  We also do a lot of content about narrow aspects of using OpenStack, such as Configuring Floating IP addresses for Networking in OpenStack Public and Private Clouds.  This series, however, is different.  In this series, we're going to look at the overall picture of what it's like to use OpenStack in the real world.

What we're going to do is create a series of tutorials that chronicle the creation of a web application on OpenStack.  Because it's easy to use and includes a lot of the pieces we need to install anyway, we'll be using Mirantis OpenStack, with Fuel as our infrastructure deployment mechanism.  We'll also be using WordPress as the foundation for the web site, not just because it's in such common usage, but also because that'll give us the opportunity to touch on most of the various pieces of OpenStack, at least as it exists today.

Some of the topics we'll cover include:

• Setting up a basic OpenStack cluster

• Creating a Virtual Machine

• Creating a database using Trove

• Using Swift for web image storage

• Adding capacity and load balancing

• Metering and billing

• Managing networking

• Template-based scaling using Heat

• Elastic Data processing with Hadoop and Savanna

• Validating configurations and running health checks

• Using Ceph

• Using multiple hypervisors such as EXSi

Our example will be a toy company, In The Box Collectibles, that starts out small and grows, gradually touching on many the various tasks OpenStack users need to know how to achieve.

Have you got a particular subject you'd like us to cover in this series (or outside of it)?  Drop us a comment and let us know!