OpenStack Operations Guide

Appendix A. Use Cases

This appendix contains a small selection of use cases from the community, with more technical detail than usual. Further examples can be found on the OpenStack website.

NeCTAR

Who uses it: researchers from the Australian publicly funded research sector. Use is across a wide variety of disciplines, with the purpose of instances ranging from running simple web servers to using hundreds of cores for high-throughput computing.

Deployment

Using OpenStack Compute cells, the NeCTAR Research Cloud spans eight sites with approximately 4,000 cores per site.

Each site runs a different configuration, as resource cells in an OpenStack Compute cells setup. Some sites span multiple data centers, some use off compute node storage with a shared file system, and some use on compute node storage with a nonshared file system. Each site deploys the Image Service with an Object Storage backend. A central Identity Service, dashboard, and Compute API service are used. A login to the dashboard triggers a SAML login with Shibboleth, which creates an account in the Identity Service with an SQL backend.

Compute nodes have 24 to 48 cores, with at least 4 GB of RAM per core and approximately 40 GB of ephemeral storage per core.

All sites are based on Ubuntu 12.04, with KVM as the hypervisor. The OpenStack version in use is typically the current stable version, with 5 to 10 percent back-ported code from trunk and modifications. Migration to Ubuntu 14.04 is planned as part of the Havana to Icehouse ...