Ubuntu Cloud and OpenStack
OpenStack is an Apache-licensed cloud computing platform. It was founded
as a collaboration between NASA and Rackspace. After less than a year, it
boasted a worldwide community of developers. Adoption has been swift, and
already many large corporations, universities, and institutions are using
OpenStack for cloud computing. Ubuntu and OpenStack have worked closely
together for a long time and have similar release schedules, and Ubuntu is the
reference operating system for OpenStack.
OpenStack is not a service provider. It doesn’t operate systems or data
centers. OpenStack is open source software for building public and private
and hybrid clouds. Many companies have implemented and use OpenStack,
which is a good thing. It means that if you develop your cloud deployment
and it works on one company’s servers, if that company is using OpenStack,
you can move that deployment to another company’s servers with little or
possibly no changes if the second company is also running OpenStack. In
fact, it is easy enough to create your deployment across several different
providers, using cloud servers from multiple companies concurrently,
according to your needs.
For a current list of cloud providers offering OpenStack to customers for
cloud deployments, see http://www.openstack.org/marketplace/public-clouds/.
You will find big names along with many you have not yet heard of that may
be just as suitable or perhaps even better for your needs.
Many cloud providers offer free trials that give users a certain amount of
usage for a limited amount of time. This can be handy for testing the
capabilities of different providers while testing deployments of components of
your system.
One interesting option while you are exploring and learning about cloud
computing is DevStack, from https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/latest/,
which is a set of extensible shell scripts (with documentation) for building
complete OpenStack development environments. This is not an option
designed for production environments, but it can be very useful for getting
started and testing the capabilities of cloud computing.
OpenStack uses for its services a set of APIs that are compatible with
Amazon APIs. Client tools written for those APIs can also be used with
OpenStack. OpenStack has several main service families, each described in
the following subsections.
OpenStack is in active development. Newer releases may have details that
differ from what is recorded in this chapter. Check the official OpenStack