The total cost of ownership for an OpenStack private cloud can be half of other infrastructure alternatives. The key to achieving such a goal is to capture relevant metrics and watch them closely. Such metrics become new word KPIs in the enterprise; it is these metrics that support the evolution for cloud services to becoming mission critical. Allowing such metrics to manifest as KPIs in pleasant and intuitive ways encourages good behavior of tenants and their supporting business unit as the business maximizes the potential of the investment. At scale, this can be realized with real-time dashboards, self-service workflows, tools to assist in right-sizing resources, and reporting for operators, financial managers, and executives. Tenants need cost estimates for budget forecasts, while executives need chargeback data to justify additional investment in the OpenStack environment.
An agile, cost effective cloud deployment must maintain the illusion of infinite capacity while maximizing the effective utilization and potential of the underlying infrastructure. Tenants expect to be able to spin up and spin down resources on demand with no concern for the underlying physical build. Operating an efficient OpenStack cloud requires total visibility into historical trending for resource requests and capacity balancing to support active workloads, passive workloads, migratory workloads and capacity planning for projections of current workloads as well as future workloads.
Verizon and Talligent will share lessons learned managing cloud use, distribution, costs and growth for the tenants in a hyperscale global OpenStack private cloud environment.
