High Availability on OpenStack

ICCLab’s MobileCloud Networking solution is supposed to offer private cloud services to end users. MobileCloud is based on OpenStack. Since our OpenStack installation is supposed to be used mainly by end users, it is necessary to provide High Availability.

As mobile end users we all know that we want our IT services to be available everytime and everywhere – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. End users normally don’t reflect that this requirement is challenge for system architects, developers and engineers who offer the IT services. Cloud components must be kept under regular maintenance to remain stable and secure. While performing maintenance changes, engineers have to shut down components. At the same time the service should still remain available for the end user. Achieving High Availability in a cloud environment is a very complex and challenging task.





How to Test your OpenStack Deployment?

Like us in the ICCLab, you have likely spent lots of time researching the best means to deploy OpenStack and you’ve decided upon a particular method (at the ICCLab we use foreman and puppet). You’ve implemented OpenStack with your chosen deployment plan and technologies and you now have an operational OpenStack cluster. The question you now have to ask is: “How do I test that all functionality is operating correctly?”


How Do You Organise Your OpenStack Deployment?

So you have a new shiny OpenStack installation! Within that installation you may have differing classes of hardware and so you wish to be able to organise those classes

To organise your OpenStack deployment there are two concepts currently available: Availability Zones (AZs) and Cells. These allow you categorise your resources within an OpenStack deployment and organise those resources as you see fit. These is a very useful feature in order to offer different types of the same service. For example you might want to offer a compute service that runs on SSDs or plain spinning disks.

In this article we’ll describe OpenStack Availability Zones (AZs) and OpenStack Cells. We’ll also show how each differ.