Cloud Management and Security

12 Real-Life Examples

This chapter outlines the main features of two of the most widely discussed Cloud management platforms: Amazon AWS (a commercial Cloud management platform) and OpenStack (an open-source Cloud management platform). Subsequently, the chapter presents a practical illustration of some of the concepts which are discussed throughout this book using OpenStack.

12.1 OpenStack

This section provides a high-level introduction to OpenStack.

12.1.1 What is OpenStack?

Chapter 3 presents an abstract view of Cloud management platforms, which we refer to as VCC. This section presents OpenStack [1] which is an example implementation of the VCC. OpenStack is an open-source software that was funded in October 2010 by Rackspace [2] and NASA [3]. Initially, OpenStack started by combining source codes from both RackSpace and NASA. A few months later, commercial companies started joining the OpenStack initiative. Currently, thousands of professionals around the word participate in the OpenStack software architecture and code development process [1].

OpenStack's main objective is to establish a Cloud management platform that is capable of meeting the needs of the next generation of Cloud computing. OpenStack is designed to be the global Cloud trusted management platform, and it is not meant to replace a VMM or a hypervisor function. It does not even have an implementation of a hypervisor or a VMM, and rather implements a set of APIs that interact with different hypervisors ...