Nowadays, enterprises are looking to modernize the IT infrastructure through the cloud, aiming to optimize and increase operations’ efficiency. Fortunately, the technology virtualization evolution provides many options to achieve agility, flexibility, and efficiency in several ways. OpenStack solution stands out among its competitors, helping enterprises accomplish all those things simultaneously.
What Is Infrastructure as a Service?
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), also known as cloud infrastructure services, is a form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources to end-users over the internet.
Over the past few years, OpenStack has become the most popular open-source software tool for building the Infrastructure as a Service environment due to its ability to quickly spin up new instances upon which cloud components can run. Moreover, OpenStack provides the technology virtualization flexibility like no other solutions available in the market.
In the IaaS model, the OpenStack software platform hosts the infrastructure components that are traditionally present in an on-premises data center. This includes servers, storage, and networking hardware, as well as the virtualization or hypervisor layer. Additionally, all the infrastructure components are further delivered to end-user via virtual machines accessible through the internet.
OpenStack Is an IaaS Tool Set
OpenStack can be seen as a tool to manage some of the core capabilities of the IaaS space, allowing its end-users to benefit from faster, easier, more flexible workloads, and more cost-efficient.
Additionally, OpenStack’s architecture is modular and highly configurable, enabling this solution to be conceived and tailored to fit available hardware resources.
There is a growing system of service projects that extend OpenStack functionality, but the infrastructure is anchored by a core set of 6 projects. As a result, having the project’s core set allows the rest of the projects to handle dashboarding, orchestration, bare-metal provisioning, messaging, containers, and governance.
The core infrastructure services of OpenStack are:
- Neutron (Networking): responsible for provisioning the virtual or physical networks that compute instances connect to on boot.
- Nova (Compute): implements services and associated libraries to provide massively scalable, on-demand, self-service access to compute resources, including bare metal, virtual machines, and containers.
- Glance (Image Management): provides the compute image repository. All compute instances launch from glance images.
- Swift (Object Storage): a highly available, distributed object/blob store. Allows users to store or retrieve files. Additionally, it can be used by the Cinder component to back up the VMs volumes.
- Cinder (Block Storage): responsible to provide persistent block storage (or volumes) to guest virtual machines. Most importantly, by working with Swift, Cinder can use it to back up the VMs volumes.
- Keystone (Authorization and Authentication): provides identity and authentication for all OpenStack services.
Besides these, another valuable feature that OpenStack brings into the IaaS is programmatic access. In the first place, there are no more manual problems, life is now simpler with API. Secondly, everything that had to be done manually can now be done programmatically. The OpenStack services have a consistent set of APIs to talk to compute, network, and storage. On top of that, OpenStack can easily manage all the environments, from automatically adding, removing to scaling up or down more components.
What Are The Benefits of Using OpenStack?
- Scalability: scale as you grow as per current needs, add more compute nodes to the IaaS environment as demand increases.
- Managing availability: detect real-time failures, ensure business continuity.
- Flexibility: use only components the business needs, meet a broad range of enterprise apps.
- Interoperability: connect multiple and varied components, hardware, and software.
- Cost control: pay for what you use model, no more no less.
- Reliability: improved performance and speed quality.
- Security: prevent and manage security threats.
- Enable Innovation: add new capabilities and leverage APIs.
- Strong community: constant product development in a competitive marketplace.
In conclusion, as an Infrastructure as a Service platform, OpenStack enables any enterprise to easily and efficiently add servers, storage, and networking components to its cloud, while having full control over the business cost.
At Sardina Systems, our OpenStack experts are available to help you better understand the benefits of cloud computing and how suitable it can be for your business. Feel free to contact us or read all about it here.
(picture source: www.openstack.org)