OpenStack is the leading open-source infrastructure component for private cloud deployments and there is plenty of value in adopting this specific cloud system. Created in July 2010 by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack turns 10 years old in July.
The success and longevity of OpenStack are powerful testimonials for any enterprise, that it is the right solution for enterprises deploying private clouds. Like many enterprise operators, you may ask, what are the best qualities to look for when choosing the right distribution for an enterprise private cloud system.
In short, you would find value in a distribution that comes pre-integrated with a suite of tools that would help automate your cloud operations and complemented with a commitment, as standard, for support with less than 6 hours response.
Of course, the following qualities are not the only qualities to take into consideration. But based on our almost a decade of experience, these are the most common challenges that enterprises face when adopting and deploying OpenStack on their own. These are some lessons learned.
While OpenStack brings rapid innovation to facilitate organizational mission, and to cater to a broad range of enterprise workloads and use cases, it can be a time-consuming chore, and without the right skills of your team, the deployment can take up to a few months, making your business lose time and money. Post-deployment, there are also challenges in integrating operations tools, to have the platform ready for production.
You can overcome these challenges, choose the right distribution, and get ready to experience your own innovative, cost-efficient, and reliable private cloud infrastructure.
6 recommended criteria to keep in mind when selecting the one-time distribution:
- A full lifecycle cloud platform
Choose a distribution that has a full lifecycle view on OpenStack, encompassing all three phases of a cloud system: confidently and rapidly Deploy, reliably Operate and Upgrade with zero-downtime. For an enterprise, the journey from zero to fully operational production OpenStack should ideally take no more than “2 cups of coffee”. OpenStack environment should be deployed easily and smoothly without requiring much effort, without having to spend much time if the distribution comes with a more flexible and simpler deployer.
- Upgrades made with Zero Downtime
Choose a distribution that removes your upgrade cloud stress. While new releases of OpenStack made available every 6 months provide new innovation, features, and capabilities, it also introduces operational upgrade challenges for Operators.
You can take advantage of these new innovations, capabilities, and improvements, and it is also recommended to be up to date with OpenStack releases to benefit from better performance and management capabilities. Look for a distribution that is able to provide Zero-Downtime upgrade to help your system attain high uptime and reliability through upgrades. Upgrades should not be an unattainable unicorn for your team.
- Automated cloud operations
Choose a distribution that is easy to manage once the OpenStack cloud is deployed. Getting the best out of your cloud system on a daily basis requires extra key functionalities necessary for cloud operations, functionalities that are not included in standard OpenStack.
A set of tools for automated cloud operations, including log management, system monitoring, capacity planning with scalable and highly available push-based monitoring handling both metrics data and log data, and usage accounting, should be on the priority list of any committed distribution bringing value to your enterprise environment.
- Lowered costs for any cloud environment
Choose a distribution that can actively and dynamically lower your cloud costs, while ensuring resource availability.
Enterprises, in a quest for business efficiency, need to optimize business costs. This can be achieved with an OpenStack distribution that can intelligently raise your utilization to lower costs.
By raising utilization, while meeting service level and ensuring service quality, you can mitigate servers over-provisioning, optimizing data center operations, lowering energy OpEx, servers CapEx, and facilities CapEx. Cloud environments can be cost-efficient if your OpenStack system comes with more than mere basic tools.
You should look for a distribution that comes “batteries-included”, fully operational following deployment, capable of dynamically right-manage resources in your cloud environment.
- High cloud service reliability
Choose a distribution that provides highly available and reliable services that can flexibly scale up your infrastructure.
OpenStack is a flexible cloud platform, but it does not come with HA and reliability by default, or they are lacking in completion.
Starting simply with a non-HA solution is not an option here. Cloud users in your enterprise need to have confidence in a highly performant, highly available, and reliable cloud system.
Your cloud platform should come with a highly available solution architecture as default, so as to gracefully manage the flow of management tasks and user requests in an automated manner, delivering high service reliability.
- Broad Integration
Choose a distribution that allows easy integration with any storage, backup, or other cloud infrastructure components.
While benefiting from the innovation across the OpenStack cloud technology, you should not forget that your enterprise may need to integrate with other open-source software at any moment in time without any difficulties.
You should look for an OpenStack distribution that can flexibly and easily integrate and operate with multiple disparate storages and networking solutions, and open-source software from an Operator’s perspective.