Open Stack

On 12/30/2014 09:10 PM, matt wrote:
> There are several fundamental problems in getting your feet wet in
> OpenStack.
> 
> First is that OpenStack is expecting to be installed into a rack of
> systems, not one system.  While there are work arounds such as devstack,
> they fail to accurately produce a production environment or even a
> useful facsimile of one.  One of the larger problems for many adopters
> of openstack at least initially is coming to grips with neutron and
> getting it plugged into their existing network environment.  Devstack
> doesn't help you here much at all.

I think this could be improved. I'm not sure how feasible that is today,
given that I've just started with OpenStack and am barely scratching the
surface.


In earlier years, when I was learning the details of Web Servers,
specifically Apache, the entry criteria wasn't this big. You could run a
local web server, listening to your loopback interface. And almost *all*
functionalities that you'd try in production, also applied on your dev
box. I could also extend this to fat webapp stacks on top of it.


Similarly, when playing around with many virtualization features, the
same theory applied. Say, for example, you want to test Live Migration.
You could create 2 virtual interfaces on your local box, bind them to
individual instances of your app (ex. libvirt), and have a common NFS
share running over loopback. And be able to test end-to-end live
migration functionality.


I understand the scope with OpenStack, and the problem that it tries to
solve, is way much bigger. Hopefully, once a bunch of us get more
accustomed to OpenStack, perhaps us will extend Devstack further.

And the first step to it is to lurk on these lists :-)


-- 
Given the large number of mailing lists I follow, I request you to CC me
in replies for quicker response