openstack-manuals/doc/arch-design/source/hybrid-technical-considerations.rst

Technical considerations

A hybrid cloud environment requires inspection and understanding of technical issues in external data centers that may not be in your control. Ideally, select an architecture and CMP that are adaptable to changing environments.

Using diverse cloud platforms increases the risk of compatibility issues, but clouds using the same version and distribution of OpenStack are less likely to experience problems.

Clouds that exclusively use the same versions of OpenStack should have no issues, regardless of distribution. More recent distributions are less likely to encounter incompatibility between versions. An OpenStack community initiative defines core functions that need to remain backward compatible between supported versions. For example, the DefCore initiative defines basic functions that every distribution must support in order to use the name OpenStack.

Vendors can add proprietary customization to their distributions. If an application or architecture makes use of these features, it can be difficult to migrate to or use other types of environments.

If an environment includes non-OpenStack clouds, it may experience compatibility problems. CMP tools must account for the differences in the handling of operations and the implementation of services.

Possible cloud incompatibilities

• Instance deployment
• Network management
• Application management
• Services implementation

Capacity planning

One of the primary reasons many organizations use a hybrid cloud is to increase capacity without making large capital investments.

Capacity and the placement of workloads are key design considerations for hybrid clouds. The long-term capacity plan for these designs must incorporate growth over time to prevent permanent consumption of more expensive external clouds. To avoid this scenario, account for future applications' capacity requirements and plan growth appropriately.

It is difficult to predict the amount of load a particular application might incur if the number of users fluctuates, or the application experiences an unexpected increase in use. It is possible to define application requirements in terms of vCPU, RAM, bandwidth, or other resources and plan appropriately. However, other clouds might not use the same meter or even the same oversubscription rates.

Oversubscription is a method to emulate more capacity than may physically be present. For example, a physical hypervisor node with 32 GB RAM may host 24 instances, each provisioned with 2 GB RAM. As long as all 24 instances do not concurrently use 2 full gigabytes, this arrangement works well. However, some hosts take oversubscription to extremes and, as a result, performance can be inconsistent. If at all possible, determine what the oversubscription rates of each host are and plan capacity accordingly.

Utilization

A CMP must be aware of what workloads are running, where they are running, and their preferred utilizations. For example, in most cases it is desirable to run as many workloads internally as possible, utilizing other resources only when necessary. On the other hand, situations exist in which the opposite is true, such as when an internal cloud is only for development and stressing it is undesirable. A cost model of various scenarios and consideration of internal priorities helps with this decision. To improve efficiency, automate these decisions when possible.

The Telemetry service (ceilometer) provides information on the usage of various OpenStack components. Note the following:

• If Telemetry must retain a large amount of data, for example when monitoring a large or active cloud, we recommend using a NoSQL back end such as MongoDB.
• You must monitor connections to non-OpenStack clouds and report this information to the CMP.

Performance

Performance is critical to hybrid cloud deployments, and they are affected by many of the same issues as multi-site deployments, such as network latency between sites. Also consider the time required to run a workload in different clouds and methods for reducing this time. This may require moving data closer to applications or applications closer to the data they process, and grouping functionality so that connections that require low latency take place over a single cloud rather than spanning clouds. This may also require a CMP that can determine which cloud can most efficiently run which types of workloads.

As with utilization, native OpenStack tools help improve performance. For example, you can use Telemetry to measure performance and the Orchestration service (heat) to react to changes in demand.

Note

Orchestration requires special client configurations to integrate with Amazon Web Services. For other types of clouds, use CMP features.

Components

Using more than one cloud in any design requires consideration of four OpenStack tools:

OpenStack Compute (nova)

Regardless of deployment location, hypervisor choice has a direct effect on how difficult it is to integrate with additional clouds.

Networking (neutron)

Whether using OpenStack Networking (neutron) or legacy networking (nova-network), it is necessary to understand network integration capabilities in order to connect between clouds.

Telemetry (ceilometer)

Use of Telemetry depends, in large part, on what the other parts of the cloud you are using.

Orchestration (heat)

Orchestration can be a valuable tool in orchestrating tasks a CMP decides are necessary in an OpenStack-based cloud.

Special considerations

Hybrid cloud deployments require consideration of two issues that are not common in other situations:

Image portability

As of the Kilo release, there is no common image format that is usable by all clouds. Conversion or recreation of images is necessary if migrating between clouds. To simplify deployment, use the smallest and simplest images feasible, install only what is necessary, and use a deployment manager such as Chef or Puppet. Do not use golden images to speed up the process unless you repeatedly deploy the same images on the same cloud.

API differences

Avoid using a hybrid cloud deployment with more than just OpenStack (or with different versions of OpenStack) as API changes can cause compatibility issues.