OpenStack implementation capable to easily handle large and expansive enterprise clouds
Developers love OpenStack for its open source benefits, its programmability, and rapid innovation. Enterprises love OpenStack for its rapid innovation to facilitate organizational mission, and flexibility to cater to a broad range of enterprise workloads and use cases.
But before OpenStack can be consumed by developers (who are Service Consumers within the enterprise) and before an enterprise can reap the bountiful benefits of OpenStack, Operators in the enterprise would need to deploy OpenStack. For the enterprise, this deployment phase is of little to no value. As such, it is imperative that the OpenStack environment can be deployed easily and smoothly without requiring much effort, without having to expend much time. This requires a more flexible and efficient deployer solution. For an enterprise, the journey from zero to fully operational production OpenStack should ideally take no more than “2 cups of coffee”.
That’s why Sardina has taken OpenStack software as a base and added a deployer on top to create the FishOS Deployer solution that is purpose-built especially for enterprise deployments and can easily scale to handle large and expansive enterprise clouds.
In the same spirit that while a database is a complex piece of software that has a large number of configurable parameters and a large number of deployment models, widespread adoption of databases such as MySQL/MariaDB is no doubt fueled by their deployment simplicity — just run ‘yum install mysql’ or ‘apt-get install mysql-server’. FishOS Deployer aims to enable such ease of implementing an OpenStack cloud while remaining flexible to cater to a broad range of deployment models and configuration.
FishOS Deployer is a set of OpenStack Ansible based scripts (“playbooks” in Ansible terminology) providing a very friendly interface for Operator users, interface that allows Operator users to enter all the necessary data in Deployer’s configuration file.
The Deployer works in an infrastructure-as-code operating model, where all the configuration is centralized and available in an easy-to-work-with format, with HA configuration coming by default and Ceph deployment integrated, allowing Operator users to rapidly and easily benefit from a full in-house OpenStack platform.
At a major European banking group, building on Sardina’s base server and networking configuration, a full FishOS environment with OpenStack and Ceph as a backing store was brought within a day, and was immediately ready for use by Service Consumers.
Sardina FishOS supports all OpenStack releases, without skipping any releases. Being a full OpenStack distribution, FishOS features all the key OpenStack components (“projects” in OpenStack terminology).
Deployment Models: Containerized? OpenStack on Kubernetes? Bare metal?
Container technology serves 2 key functions: software packaging and kernel privilege segmentation. Kubernetes extends on these key functionalities further to enables programmable, flexible, rapidly deployable environments.
While some OpenStack distribution has chosen to deploy OpenStack in a containerized manner using Kubernetes, Sardina is of the opinion that the benefits of such deployment approach can also be attained by coupling a smart Deployer and well-engineered RPM packages. As an example, FishOS Deployer provides a solution to easily migrate OpenStack management services from one node to another or to flexibly upgrade or downgrade software packages. These capabilities enable broad audience of Operators to be able to confidently deploy, operate and upgrade FishOS OpenStack platforms, without dictating in-depth understanding of Kubernetes as prerequisites. Adopting containers and Kubernetes would involve a learning curve too, though with FishOS this unnecessary, while not sacrificing any benefits! If you do find a use case that cannot be met without Kubernetes, please do get in touch with Sardina Systems to claim a free ticket to the next OpenStack Summit!
The Joy of Upgrade?
While new releases of OpenStack introduces every 6 months provide new innovation, features and capabilities, it also introduces operational upgrade challenges for Operators. Sardina recommends Operators to be up to date with OpenStack releases to benefit from better performance and management capabilities in addition to security, leveraging on the unique FishOS support for Zero-Downtime upgrade to attain high uptime and reliability through upgrade processes. FishOS is the first to introduce Zero-Downtime upgrade for OpenStack and has consistently provided this valuable unique capability since Mitaka release.
Open Source
As Sardina wants to support OpenStack and its Open Source model, we are now offering free no-charge access to FishOS Deployer for a limited period of time.
Please contact us at info@sardinasystems.com.
Thank you!