OpenStack Compute

OpenStack Compute is open source software designed to provision and manage large networks of virtual machines, creating a redundant and scalable cloud computing platform. It gives you the software, control panels, and APIs required to orchestrate a cloud, including running instances, managing networks, and controlling access through users and projects. OpenStack Compute strives to be both hardware and hypervisor agnostic, currently supporting a variety of standard hardware configurations and seven major hypervisors.

OpenStack Compute Datasheet (300K) PDF

Software

Current Release

OpenStack Compute - Essex Release

Released April 5, 2012. Release Notes

Documentation: Online Manuals

Download (via Launchpad)

Next Milestone

OpenStack Compute "Folsom" planned for Q4 2012.

Developer editions of Compute are available on the OpenStack Launchpad.

Demo: OpenStack Control Panel Overview

Popular Use Cases

  • Service providers offering an IaaS compute platform
  • IT departments provisioning compute resources to teams and projects
  • Processing big data with tools like Hadoop
  • Scaling compute up and down to meet demand for web resources and applications

The features below are available in the current release.

Feature Benefit

Manage virtualized commodity server resources
CPU, memory, disk, and network interfaces

Racks of commodity servers as pools of computing
Improved utilization and automation of resources for greater cost efficiencies

Manage Local Area Networks (LAN)
Flat, Flat DHCP, VLAN DHCP, IPv6

Programmatically allocate IPs and VLANs VLANs 
(for rapid provisioning of network capabilities and security features)
Flexible networking models to suit needs of each application  and/or user group

API with rate limiting and authentication

Designed for automation and security
(to  make it easy for you to manage who has access to compute resources and prevents users from impacting each other with excessive API utilization)

Distributed and asynchronous architecture

Massively scalable and highly available system
(for increased assurance of system uptime)

Virtual Machine (VM) image management

Easily store, import, share, and query images
(to make it easy for you to spin up new standardized VMs)

Live VM management (Instance)
Run, reboot, suspend, resize, terminate instances

Increase productivity with lifecycle management
(from a single user interface and using the APIs)

Floating IP addresses

Keep IPs & DNS correct when managing VMs

Security Groups

Flexibility to assign and control access to VM instances by creating separation between resource pools 

Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

Ensure security by user, role and project

Projects & Quotas

Ability to allocate, track and limit resource utilization

VNC Proxy through web browser

Quick and easy CLI administration

Advanced Scheduler

(Diablo v3 07/28 – Started)

Scheduler decision framework for more efficient mgmt./provisioning

Federated Auth with Zones

(Diablo v4 08/25 – TBD)

Allows to control permissions b/w public and private zones

The features below are planned for future releases.

Feature Benefit

Event Notification

(Diablo v2 06/30 – Implemented)

Pro-active alerting
(e.g.: notification of instance builds, deletions and migrations are useful for monitoring and billing applications.)

Distributed scheduler

(Diablo v2 06/30 – Implemented)

Robust scheduler for scalability and high availability
(for large scale deployments potentially spanning across DCs)

System usage

(Diablo v2 06/30 – Started)

Provides metrics for billing, chargeback, or monitoring purposes

Boot with volume

(Diablo v3 07/28 – Code Review)

shorter boot time, persistent root partition

Virtual storage arrays

(Diablo v2 06/30 – In Progress)

Allows to emulates Enterprise class storage arrays, offer better capabilities than Amazon-S3

Global firewall rules

(Diablo v2 06/30 – Implemented)

DDOS prevention
Drops all traffic from blacklisted IPs before it reaches instances