This document discusses TripleO, an open source project that uses OpenStack to manage and deploy OpenStack. TripleO uses Heat for orchestration and Nova bare metal to provision physical servers. It defines an "undercloud" OpenStack installation on bare metal servers that then hosts an "overcloud" OpenStack installation as a tenant using KVM virtual machines. This approach aims to reduce costs for installing, maintaining, and upgrading OpenStack deployments.
This document discusses optimizing VM images for OpenStack with KVM/QEMU. It covers disk and container formats like RAW, QCOW2, and AMI. It also discusses tools for manipulating disk files, launching an instance, image OS preparation using cloud-init, authentication models, networking configuration, and hotplug support. The goal is to provide optimized images that support features like snapshots while allowing faster instance launching and increased storage efficiency.
OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that provides infrastructure as a service. It supports various virtualization technologies and operating systems. Key components include Nova (compute), Swift (object storage), Glance (image registry), Neutron (networking), and Horizon (dashboard/GUI). OpenStack is deployed across many large companies and used both privately and publicly by organizations like Rackspace, HP, IBM, Cisco, and more. It provides an alternative to proprietary cloud platforms like AWS and works with various hypervisors, storage backends, and networking technologies.