solving the cloudstack puzzle. the complete stack explored
DESCRIPTION
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.TRANSCRIPT
Ed LaczynskiVP – Cloud Strategy
Datapipe@edla
Solving the Cloud PuzzleThe Complete Stack Explored
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!
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
ea
But you need more
To deploy at scale
To deploy production workloads – public or private
You need:A whole bunch of technology assets and software.
Great people and expertise.
Willingness to experiment, learn, and grow
The Stratosphere CloudStack Cloud
THE HARDWARE STACKDatacenter, Network, Security, and Computing
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.
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. “
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.
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.
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.
THE SOFTWARE STACKEverything else.
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.
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
Inside out Splunk view of a global CloudStack cloud
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.
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
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.
You can innovate with reporting.
• Great API. But …. The default URL endpoint is ugly, insecure, inflexible, and not highly available.http://somecloudstackmanagementserver:8080/client/api
• HAProxy and nginx load balancers/reverse proxy architecure. SSL encryption.https://cloud.datapipe.com/api/compute/v1–Pretty. Secure. Flexible. Reliable.
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.