Sample Configurations

Many groups have the need for High Throughput Computing (HTC) for a particular use case, such as the IT department at CERN who provides compute, storage and networking resources to conduct experiments using data from the Large Hadron Collider. When building a cloud that spans data centers and is designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of cores, HTC users often turn to Nova Cells, and present a single API end point to users through the Horizon dashboard. Keystone is commonly used to connect to LDAP backends, where user accounts are stored. An example configuration of projects for this use case are detailed below. Rally is a performance testing tool for benchmarking large scale cloud environments.

Some of the largest web hosting companies in the world rely on OpenStack to host millions of websites, such as GoDaddy. Along with the common core services like Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Glance, and Horizon, web hosting companies often leverage Ceilometer as part of their billing infrastructure to collect data on user accounts.

OpenStack powers public clouds, providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to users in dozens of countries all over the planet. In addition to Nova, Glance, Keystone, Cinder, and Neutron, public cloud providers often leverage Swift to offer Object Storage as a service, and Designate to provide DNSaaS.

Many organizations, such as eBay, Overstock.com and Best Buy, are using OpenStack as a backend for web services and eCommerce at scale. In some cases, OpenStack clouds are configured to meet strict regulatory compliance requirements such as PCI standards. Trove is often used to offer Database as a Service to their internal customers and software defined networking is provided using Neutron.

The OpenStack Technical Committee defined the Compute Starter Kit as a common starting point for a compute-oriented OpenStack cloud that can be expanded over time to include more of the OpenStack universe. The starter kit is a simplified set of projects, with functions that nearly all clouds will want to have and documented ways to expand the cloud with additional capabilities. Where at all possible, expanding the Starter Kit should be non-disruptive rather than a replacement of one option with another.

Providing scalable, elastic infrastructure for big data collection and analytics has been a primary use case for OpenStack, such as a Top 10 Automaker that analyzes data from a variety sources including sensors in vehicles and social media feedback. Project Sahara, an emerging option for big data analytics, provides a simple means to provision a data-intensive application cluster (such as Hadoop or Spark) on top of OpenStack. Like most OpenStack components, it's pluggable with support for a variety of data processing frameworks. It is often deployed with the Ironic bare metal service.

Every company relies heavily on databases to back their applications, and for some automating the routine management and scale out of these is a high priority. The OpenStack Trove project helps provide this capabiilty, and supports multiple SQL and NoSQL backends. To maximize database performance the Ironic project is commonly used to provide bare metal provisioning.   

A popular use case for OpenStack is video processing and content delivery across regions, whether it's a production studio or major cable service provider. In one example, the emerging federated identity standard now available in Keystone to seamlessly move video content across private and public clouds using the same dashboard and authentication.

OpenStack is built to integrate with emerging technologies, so that users can operate a single cloud with workloads running in virtual machines, containers, and on bare metal. To faciliate integration with emerging Container Orchestration Engines (COE) like Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker Swarm, OpenStack users have access to a new project called Magnum. In the sample configuration below, the cloud leverages Magnum to deploy their choice of COE on the core OpenStack services to drive developer productivity.