An OpenStack general purpose cloud is often considered a starting point for building a cloud deployment. General purpose clouds, by their nature, balance the components and do not emphasize (or heavily emphasize) any particular aspect of the overall computing environment. The expectation is that the compute, network, and storage components will be given equal weight in the design. General purpose clouds can be found in private, public, and hybrid environments. They lend themselves to many different use cases but, since they are homogeneous deployments, they are not suited to specialized environments or edge case situations. Common uses to consider for a general purpose cloud could be, but are not limited to, providing a simple database, a web application runtime environment, a shared application development platform, or lab test bed. In other words, any use case that would benefit from a scale-out rather than a scale-up approach is a good candidate for a general purpose cloud architecture. A general purpose cloud, by definition, is something that is designed to have a range of potential uses or functions; not specialized for a specific use. General purpose architecture is largely considered a scenario that would address 80% of the potential use cases. The infrastructure, in itself, is a specific use case. It is also a good place to start the design process. As the most basic cloud service model, general purpose clouds are designed to be platforms suited for general purpose applications. General purpose clouds are limited to the most basic components, but they can include additional resources such as: Virtual-machine disk image library Raw block storage File or object storage Firewalls Load balancers IP addresses Network overlays or virtual local area networks (VLANs) Software bundles