Preface

This book is aimed at developers, technologists, and system administrators eager to understand and deploy cloud computing infrastructure projects based upon OpenStack software. It is intended to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the OpenStack project goals, details of specific OpenStack software components, general design decisions, and detailed steps to deploy OpenStack in a few controlled scenarios. Along the way, readers would also learn common pitfalls in architecting, deploying, and implementing their cloud.

P.1. Intended Audience

This book assumes that the reader is familiar with public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offerings such as Rackspace Cloud or Amazon Web Services. In addition, it demands an understanding of Linux systems administration, such as installing servers, networking with iptables, and basic virtualization technologies.

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P.3. Using Code Examples

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P.6. Acknowledgments

In general, I would like to thank the entire OpenStack community that gathers on the #openstack IRC channel, mail aliases, and forums. The help and encouragement from hoards of people I might never meet face-to-face has been of immeasurable value. Thank you.

More specifically, I would like to thank many people for their help both in the past and the present that led me to this place:

• A special thanks to Josh Kearney for collaborating with me on my first Nova blueprint, as well as technically reviewing this book.

• Jay Pipes, for walking me through my first halting few commits and his leadership of Glance.

• Vishvananda Ishaya, for generally being a fountain of cloud knowledge and for his technical leadership of the Nova project.

• Anne Gentle, for spearheading the awesome OpenStack wiki and documentation.

• The people at Cloudscaling, who have been helping customers around the world deploy OpenStack clouds. A special thanks to Francesco Paolo and Andrew Shafer for their support.

• Brian Pepple, for his technical review of the book, as well as his introduction to open source development.

• Diego Parrilla and the team at StackOps, for access to their distribution and for their technical review of the book.

• The fine people at Spark and Associates, especially Joon Lee, Nick Lee, and Sung Park.

• Shlomo Swidler, for insights into cloud infrastructures at levels above where I usually contemplate.

• Dan Sanderson, who unlocked the riddle of using Scrivener, DocBook, Python, and subversion in harmony for me.

• All the great people that I worked with at Sun Microsystems over the years, especially Dr. James Baty, Jason Carolan, John Stanford, SeChang Oh, Bonghwan Kim, Richard Qualls, Scott Radeztsky, Brad Vaughan, Ken Buchanan, Jeff McIver, Edward Wustenhoff, Neeladri Bose, Bill Walker, and Gary Kelly. Many of them were pioneering dynamic infrastructures long ago and profoundly influenced my thinking along the way.

Finally, but certainly not least, thanks to my amazing partner, Shelley, for her love and support.