Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Cloud Computing and OpenStack


"Cloud" has become a household term these days, more from a buzz word. I was curious to know what exactly people refer as a cloud and how it works. so here is some light over cloud computing and OpenStack. { Also, I was involved in a one-week training for Red Hat OpenStack at work.}


Cloud Computing is typically defined as a type of computing that relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications.

In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

When talking about a cloud computing system, it's helpful to divide it into two sections: the front end and the back end. They connect to each other through a network, usually the Internet. The front end is the side the computer user, or client, sees. The back end is the "cloud" section of the system.

The front end includes the client's computer (or computer network) and the application required to access the cloud computing system.

On the back end of the system are the various computers, servers and data storage systems that create the "cloud" of computing services. In theory, a cloud computing system could include practically any computer program you can imagine, from data processing to video games. Usually, each application will have its own dedicated server.


Cloud computing has started to obtain mass appeal in corporate data centers as it enables the data center to operate like the Internet through the process of enabling computing resources to be accessed and shared as virtual resources in a secure and scalable manner.



OpenStack is a free and open-source software cloud computing software platform. OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA. Currently, it is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012[3] to promote OpenStack software and its community.
RackSpace donated the code that powers its storage and content delivery service (Cloud Files) and production servers (Cloud Servers). NASA contributed the technology that powers Nebula, their high performance computing, networking and data storage cloud service that allows researchers to work with large scientific data sets.

OpenStack has a modular architecture that currently has eleven components:

 Nova - provides virtual machines (VMs) upon demand.
Swift - provides a scalable storage system that supports object storage.
Cinder - provides persistent block storage to guest VMs.
Glance - provides a catalog and repository for virtual disk images.
Keystone - provides authentication and authorization for all the OpenStack services.
Horizon - provides a modular web-based user interface (UI) for OpenStack services.
Neutron - provides network connectivity-as-a-service between interface devices managed by OpenStack services.
Ceilometer - provides a single point of contact for billing systems.
Heat - provides orchestration services for multiple composite cloud applications.
Trove - provides database-as-a-service provisioning for relational and non-relational database engines.
Sahara - provides data processing services for OpenStack-managed resources.


OpenStack officially became an independent non-profit organization in September 2012. The OpenStack community, which is overseen by a board of directors, is comprised of many direct and indirect competitors, including IBM, Intel and VMware.


Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers an integrated foundation to create, deploy, and scale a secure and reliable public or private OpenStack cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform combines the world’s leading enterprise Linux and the fastest-growing cloud infrastructure platform to give you the agility to scale and quickly meet customer demands without compromising on availability, security, or performance.


References:
You would get basic data from Wikipedia. so, I am posting other references.

Cloud Computing

OpenStack



Red Hat Open Stack


 A/N: I have collected data from different sources so the credits of write-up goes to the authors.

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