openstack-manuals/doc/arch-design-draft/source/introduction.rst

Introduction

OpenStack is a fully-featured, self-service cloud. This book takes you through some of the considerations you have to make when designing your cloud.

Intended audience

This book has been written for architects and designers of OpenStack clouds. For a guide on deploying and operating OpenStack, please refer to the OpenStack Operations Guide.

Before reading this book, we recommend:

• Prior knowledge of cloud architecture and principles.
• Experience in enterprise system design.
• Linux and virtualization experience.
• A basic understanding of networking principles and protocols.

How this book is organized

This book follows a structure similar to what system architects would use in developing cloud architecture design documents. The sections covered are:

• Identifying stakeholders<identifying-stakeholders>: Discover different business requirements and architecture design based on different internal and external stakeholders.
• Functional requirements<functional-requirements>: Information for SMEs on deployment methods and how they will affect deployment cost.
• User requirements<user-requirements>: Information for SMEs on business and technical requirements.
• Operator requirements<operator-requirements>: Information on Service Level Agreement (SLA) considerations, selecting the right hardware for servers and switches, and integration with external identity provider.
• Capacity planning and scaling<capacity-planning-scaling>: Information on storage and networking.
• High Availability<high-availability>: Separation of data plane and control plane, and how to eliminate single points of failure.
• Security requirements<security-requirements>: The security requirements you will need to consider for the different OpenStack scenarios.
• Legal requirements<legal-requirements>: The legal requirements you will need to consider for the different OpenStack scenarios.
• Example architectures<example-architectures>: An examination of some of the most common uses for OpenStack clouds, and explanations of the considerations for each use case.