Operating OpenStack - Case Study in the Rackspace Cloud

Editor's Notes

• #3: Hello. I am Rainya Mosher, the software development manager at Rackspace Hosting, based in San Antonio, TX, USA. My team is in charge of deployment automation for the Product Infrastructure segment, which is the foundation of our public cloud offering, powered by OpenStack. You can reach out to me after today on twitter or if you are on the IRC freenode network, you can find me under the handle “rainya.” I am very excited to be here today to share with you information about OpenStack, how we are Rackspace use the software to run the largest open public cloud, and provide some insight into the hybrid cloud use case and story. When you leave today’s session, my intent is that you have a few key takeaway, namely: What is the hybrid cloud? Why choose OpenStack? How does Rackspace operate OpenStack for their public cloud.
• #4: In the early 1960s, computer scientists working on mainframes envisioned a future where computing would be available using a utility model. The mainframe model evolved in the 90s to the modern data center. Individual servers began filling the old mainframe rooms as the growth of internet bought a surge of demand for computing. In the late 90s and early 2000s, virtualization became more common and easier to accomplish. Businesses realized they could extend a single dedicated server to provided multiple purposes for different projects and control costs and the time to acquire new hardware. In the mid- to late-2000s, the first cloud offerings began to enter the market. Now, more than 50 years since those early scientist's vision for computing, OpenStack provides open source software that enables more computing options than ever before.REF: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/03/05/the-evolution-of-the-data-center-timeline-from-the-mainframe-to-the-cloud-tc0114/
• #5: When you look at the history of computing in the last 50 years, the evolution from mainframe to dedicated servers to virtualization to public cloud computing, the transitions between these different technologies are not the same for everyone. Each offering has strengths and every user of computing may have a slightly different use case to meet their needs. When we talk about the “hybrid cloud” at Rackspace, it goes beyond a single product that can be packaged up and delivered to everyone. The hybrid cloud is the idea that an individual can consume whatever piece of infrastructure they need at the time that they need it in an overall experience that is consistent, accessible, and seamless. This story enables the individual to focus on their core competency – be it to write code, analyze data, or conduct research – while letting the hybrid cloud experience handle their infrastructure needs. With a hybrid cloud experience, you have access to the performance of a single dedicated server, the option to virtualize a group of servers for your own private use, and the economies of public cloud servers all in a single, integrated portfolio offering. That is the promise and potential of a hybrid cloud solution, and Rackspace is defining the cloud as open.
• #6: Within the context of hybrid cloud story, the public cloud powered by OpenStack has proven to be a unique challenge for Rackspace. Offering infrastructure as a service is a challenge in and of itself, but OpenStack software is written by thousands of contributors located all over the world. As a vendor, Rackspace is a member of the community and does not directly own or control the software we are consuming and deploying to our public infrastructure. We work with the community and collaborate with dozens of other companies and hundreds of individuals on a regular basis.
• #7: TheOpenStack Cloud Operating System is a collection of distinct services that are accessed through APIs. When installed on top of hardware, it creates a flexible and powerful cloud offering in which virtual servers can be created, modified, and deleted through a few clicks on the dashboard or through a direct call to the API.REF: http://www.openstack.org/software/
• #9: The Rackspace cloud spans multiple regions, which are collections of physical hosts located in the same geographic area. A region is made of one or more cells, each of which is made of several hundred hypervisors installed on physical hosts. As of March 2014, Rackspace has 6 regions: 3 in North America, 1 in Australia, 1 in the United Kingdom, and 1 in Hong Kong. For Rackspace, cloud scale means maintaining OpenStack services on hundreds of thousands of instances (physical and virtual) in an expanding, multi-region global cloud. In addition to the physical hosts, each hypervisor is controlled by a compute service. At the cell and region levels, OpenStack services are installed on virtual instances to form the region and cell control plane.
• #10: When we talk about updating and deploying to the public cloud, we most frequently update the code that runs the OpenStack services. The hypervisor software needs patching from time-to-time, but this is a far less frequent event than the OpenStack changes. The basic strategy used to deploy updates to OpenStack onto our public cloud is simple. Rackspace pulls down OpenStack code from the upstream trunk branch, packages the code with configurations and integration points for internal systems, distribute the package to all the nodes, execute the code in the package, and then verify that it works through automated testing. The concept is simple, but the optimal execution is an ongoing learning opportunity.
• #11: OpenStack releases in 6 month cycles. The OpenStack release cycle is given a code name (for example, “Icehouse” or “Grizzly”) and the community targets a specific set of functionality to deliver by the end of the cycle. Rackspace pulls more frequently from OpenStack upstream code, about every 60 days, and will do one or more deploys to production from that iteration.
• #20: OpenStack cycles on a
• #21: Check out Wednesday’s session at 430p on how Rackspace is “Learning to Scale OpenStack” for the story behind the most recent internal release branch!