From Bare Metal to Cloud: OpenStack Deployment Tools 1

Over the past three weeks, we've covered cloud concepts and OpenStack architecture. Starting today, we'll dive into OpenStack deployment. First, I'll introduce some common OpenStack deployment tools.

Contents

OpenStack Deployment Tools

There are many different OpenStack deployment tools, each suited for different architectures and environments. In these two articles, I will walk through some common OpenStack deployment tools, including the following:

DevStack
MicroStack
TripleO
OpenStack Charms
OpenStack-Ansible
Kolla-Ansible
OpenStack-Helm

DevStack

As the name suggests, "DevStack" is intended for "Devs." Its primary purpose is to provide OpenStack developers with an environment where they can quickly test features.

DevStack is essentially a series of shell scripts that, by default, use the latest version from the git master branch to quickly deploy a complete OpenStack environment. Its main use is as an interactive development environment and as the foundation for functional testing in upstream OpenStack components.

MicroStack

What is MicroStack?

An OpenStack Environment in Just 2 Commands

MicroStack is a project that allows you to generate a basic OpenStack environment with just two commands. It significantly lowers the barrier to entry for using OpenStack. It is installed via Ubuntu Snap Packages.
It has the following features:

Fast Installation

I have personally tested it: on a machine with 4 cores, 16GB RAM, and a 100GB SSD, it took only about 30 minutes in total to complete a MicroStack installation. The installation speed is very fast.

Upstream

The OpenStack installed by MicroStack uses unmodified upstream source code, so you don't have to worry about system instability caused by proprietary vendor additions.

Comprehensive

The environment created by MicroStack includes most major OpenStack components, including:

Keystone
Nova
Glance
Neutron
Cinder
Horizon

Basically, most OpenStack features are fully supported.

Installation

For installation methods, you can refer to the official documentation or thearticleI wrote previously; I won't go into detail here.

MicroStack greatly simplifies the learning curve for OpenStack. Although Canonical suggests it can be used for edge deployments, from my perspective, it is currently not suitable for actual production environments.

Summary

The two deployment methods mentioned above are more for testing and experimentation. We will introduce the remaining deployment tools in the next article. The tools covered in the next part are widely recognized by the community and used in production environments, and the deployment method we will use for this series is one of them.