OpenStack Operations Guide

Chapter 2. Provisioning and Deployment

A critical part of a cloud’s scalability is the amount of effort that it takes to run your cloud. To minimize the operational cost of running your cloud, set up and use an automated deployment and configuration infrastructure with a configuration management system, such as Puppet or Chef. Combined, these systems greatly reduce manual effort and the chance for operator error.

This infrastructure includes systems to automatically install the operating system’s initial configuration and later coordinate the configuration of all services automatically and centrally, which reduces both manual effort and the chance for error. Examples include Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt. You can even use OpenStack to deploy OpenStack, fondly named TripleO, for OpenStack On OpenStack.

Automated Deployment

An automated deployment system installs and configures operating systems on new servers, without intervention, after the absolute minimum amount of manual work, including physical racking, MAC-to-IP assignment, and power configuration. Typically, solutions rely on wrappers around PXE boot and TFTP servers for the basic operating system install and then hand off to an automated configuration management system.

Both Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux include mechanisms for configuring the operating system, including preseed and kickstart, that you can use after a network boot. Typically, these are used to bootstrap an automated configuration system. Alternatively, you can use ...