Member Article

OpenStack Automation Mantra With Cloud Deployment Tools

In the cloud environment, the agenda is to ‘automate everything’. With no surprise, the scope of OpenStack automation is expanding and eventually automation projects are increasing within the radius. The latest acquisitions of Piston Cloud Computing and Blue Box by Cisco and IBM respectively, have topped the index of top guns closing the deals that position OpenStack as the fascinating vanilla for cloud solutions. Along with those two companies Oracle , EMC and HP are now taking the positions in acquiring the smaller OpenStack-based organizations.

In this article, we shall know how the cloud deployment tools help you to install/update openstack automation on the bare metal. Cloud deployment tools tackle with provisioning the components of openstack-creating the OpenStack cloud. The first thing that is to be automated is deployment of OpenStack with these mature and broadly used tools.

• Fuel - A control plane for establishing and managing OpenStack

Fuel was previously Mirantis’ proprietary solution which was released in 2013 and is now open source and is subscribed to OpenStack. An orchestration layer on top of MCollective, Puppet and Cobbler, Fuel marshals Mirantis’ best practices of OpenStack deployment. Just like other tools in this class, it does network verification, OS provisioning hardware discovery, and deployment of OpenStack components. Fuel’s well-defined feature is a faultless and easy to use Web User Interface that makes OpenStack installation look simple. Fuel is seen a lot in the field in today’s cloud environment. OpenStack newbies prefer Fuel for its ease of use features in proof of concepts for making their cloud up and running.

• Compass - It is another open source project designed to offer “deployment as a service” to a group of bare metal machines.

In January 2014, Huawei developed compass to meet their specific needs and made available as open source, OpenStack-related project. Compass developers standardize it as an extensible, simple data-driven platform for deployment and not confined to OpenStack. With its plugin layer, it influences other tools for configuration management, OS and hypervisor deployment and hardware discovery. Compass is a related project which is positioned as useful and something more than OpenStack.

• TripleO - Using OpenStack own facilities, TripleO installs, operates and upgrades OpenStack cloud

It is an under-cloud and a dedicated OpenStack installation used to deploy other OpenStack clouds - “overclouds” on bare metal. The coveted over-cloud configuration is described in a Heat template, and the establishment orchestrated by Heat. By using Nova bare metal nodes are provisioned on bare metal: it PXE-boots the disk image and set up images with OpenStack components. The images are actively generated with disk-image builder from image elements. TripleOfocusses on ultra large-scale deployments to do uninterrupted integration and deployment of many raising OpenStack clouds. TripleO is an “integrated” project that has most adherences in OpenStack community and support from Red Hat, HP and other companies. Tekslate Openstack training helps IT people to understand the intricacies of the Openstack.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Maria Marcel .