An overview of the design philosophy, vendor mix, and integration requirements for delivery of a production grade public or private cloud zone in Apache CloudStack.
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Solving the CloudStack puzzle. The complete stack explored.
1. Solving the Cloud Puzzle
The Complete Stack Explored
Ed Laczynski
VP – Cloud Strategy
Datapipe
@edla
edl@datapipe.com
2. DISCLAIMER
• No endorsements
of products by
Datapipe implied.
• Any opinions are
my own.
• YMMV. Use this
information at your
own risk.
• Thanks to reddit for
the pics
• Enjoy!
3. CloudStack: The Key Ingredient.
• Strong open source community
• Works at scale in production today, yet
easy to get started
• Wide ISV and ecosystem support
• Compatible will all major computing,
network, storage, and hypervisor
options, including AWS
• Lots of room for DIFFERENTIATION
4. But you need more
To deploy at scale You need:
A whole bunch of
technology assets and
To deploy production software.
workloads – public or
private Great people and expertise.
Willingness to experiment,
learn, and grow
7. You Need a Datacenter*
Three ways to get one:
1. Have one already
2. Build one (expensive)
3. Rent space in one (cheaper)
* This is where many folks stop
and use someone else’s cloud.
8. CloudStack requires a reliable and
flexible network design.
• 10GbE
• Redundant links to each component
• Separate management interface for network KVM
• Look for broad standards support, ability to
deploy in small, reliable chunks, loads of
bandwidth. You’ll need that for your IP based
storage.
• Doesn’t need to be too fancy. But needs to be
PLANNED.
• CloudStack will handle handle much of your
tenant networking. “Pseudo-SDN. “
9. Security
• Programmable routing and firewall rules are
really important. You’ll want flexibility.
• Ability to design network separation between
management, guest, and utility networks.
• Juniper SRX works well with CloudStack. Well
known, lots of support, lots of different models
available.
• Nail down your CloudStack network model early.
Rebuilding Zones and VLANs, IP bindings not fun.
10. Computing
• Buy servers.
• Lots of RAM.
• Reliability does matter. Be careful with off-
brands.
• We like simple 1U or 2U pizza boxes that can
be ripped and replaced. YMMV.
11. Storage (aka My Precious)
• We use a variety of vendors and storage
designs to surface reliable PRIMARY and
SECONDARY storage.
• We chose to standardize on NFS for both
storage models, across hypervisors. Keep it
simple.
• Use different storage for management
(Murphy’s Law)
• IP based. Use those 10GbE pipes.
• CloudStack doesn’t include Object Storage.
13. Dashboard & Portal
• What your customers see. The surface of
your cloud.
• Build your own? Need talented software
devs. You can respond to customers
quickly.
• OR Use commercial product
• OR keep it simple with basic CloudStack
UI and server automation scripting.
Depends on your use case.
14. Logging
• CloudStack has limited logging capability; not
very useful for operational management.
• Need to alert on specific warnings, analyze
and pinpoint issues, etc.
• Splunk is your friend.
• Aggregate usage data as well - report on
templates, Service Offerings, etc
17. Monitoring
• Cloud Ops requires extensive monitoring at all
levels, from physical infrastructure and system
resources, through the hypervisors, to the guest
resources.
• Built in monitoring is limited to non-existent.
• We use a mix of Zenoss and some proprietary IP.
• Why Zenoss? It’s CloudStack compatible,
agentless, and has a decent API to build on.
• We surface this as “Advanced Monitoring” via our
portals and API endpoints. Think about how you
offer monitoring.
18.
19. Metering
• CloudStack has limited metering for certain
network models
• Third-party products can be plugged in:
– InMon Traffic Sentinel
• You still need to build your own metering for
any differentiated offerings.
• Metering needs to tie into your billing and
commercial model
20. Reporting and Billing
• Users and business execs want
reports.
• Users need to pay or allocate
funds for chargeback.
• CloudStack has very limited reporting and billing
capabilities.
• With combination of direct database access, a
logging tool, and some API calls, very elegant
reporting and billing interfaces can be built.
• We aggregate data in a NoSQL DB cluster (REDIS)
for quick and instant reporting and reconciliations.
23. • Great API. But …. The default URL
endpoint is ugly, insecure, inflexible, and not
highly
available.http://somecloudstackmanagemen
tserver:8080/client/api
• HAProxy and nginx load balancers/reverse
proxy architecure. SSL
encryption.https://cloud.datapipe.com/api/c
ompute/v1
–Pretty. Secure. Flexible. Reliable.
24. Even more stuff
• Documentation
• Hypervisor Management
• Support and Ticketing
• Server Automation
• Template Management
• Capacity Management
• Sales force automation/CRM integration
• Marketing automation integration
• Guest Security, VPN, and Load Balancing
• Application Stacks
• …..and the list goes on.
Hello my name isI amDatapipe isWe’ve built a large production global cloudstack cloud that is available in public, hybrid, and private flavors.Today I’m going to try to Explore the bits and pieces around a production cloudstack deployment. We only have 45 minutes, so I’ll be covereing some of these topics at a surface level. Would be great if this could be interactive so I’ll pause for questions throughout the presentaiton.
5 Regions10+ Zones10GECloudStack 2.2.14GA July 2012Time to beta – 6 months
N+NReliable power and coolingRoom for growthRemote Hands Support or Managed Service capability
Lots of concurrent VLAN support, hypervisor awareness, and programmability.
Ugly duckling
Ugly duckling
So much opportunity for software developers in these spaces.