openstack-manuals/doc/arch-design/multi_site/section_architecture_multi_site.xml
Christian Berendt 96dcda0406 Rename directories 'images' to 'figures'
To unify the directory structure used inside the DocBook directories
all image files should be located inside a directory called 'figures'.

Change-Id: I5cbdfdee7c8c9137158607994f91e65a022fc799
2015-01-12 16:52:39 +01:00

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
version="5.0"
xml:id="arch-design-architecture-multiple-site">
<?dbhtml stop-chunking?>
<title>Architecture</title>
<para>This graphic is a high level diagram of a multiple site OpenStack
architecture. Each site is an OpenStack cloud but it may be necessary to
architect the sites on different versions. For example, if the second
site is intended to be a replacement for the first site, they would be
different. Another common design would be a private OpenStack cloud with
replicated site that would be used for high availability or disaster
recovery. The most important design decision is how to configure the
storage. It can be configured as a single shared pool or separate pools,
depending on the user and technical requirements.</para>
<mediaobject>
<imageobject>
<imagedata contentwidth="4in"
fileref="../figures/Multi-Site_shared_keystone_horizon_swift1.png"/>
</imageobject>
</mediaobject>
<section xml:id="openstack-services-architecture">
<title>OpenStack services architecture</title>
<para>The OpenStack Identity service, which is used by all other
OpenStack components for authorization and the catalog of service
endpoints, supports the concept of regions. A region is a logical
construct that can be used to group OpenStack services that are in
close proximity to one another. The concept of regions is flexible;
it may can contain OpenStack service endpoints located within a
distinct geographic region, or regions. It may be smaller in scope,
where a region is a single rack within a data center or even a
single blade chassis, with multiple regions existing in adjacent
racks in the same data center.</para>
<para>The majority of OpenStack components are designed to run within
the context of a single region. The OpenStack Compute service is
designed to manage compute resources within a region, with support
for subdivisions of compute resources by using availability zones
and cells. The OpenStack Networking service can be used to manage
network resources in the same broadcast domain or collection of
switches that are linked. The OpenStack Block Storage service
controls storage resources within a region with all storage
resources residing on the same storage network. Like the OpenStack
Compute service, the OpenStack Block Storage service also supports
the availability zone construct which can be used to subdivide
storage resources.</para>
<para>The OpenStack dashboard, OpenStack Identity, and OpenStack
Object Storage services are components that can each be deployed
centrally in order to serve multiple regions.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="arch-multi-storage">
<title>Storage</title>
<para>With multiple OpenStack regions, having a single OpenStack Object
Storage service endpoint that delivers shared file storage for all
regions is desirable. The Object Storage service internally
replicates files to multiple nodes. The advantages of this are that,
if a file placed into the Object Storage service is visible to all
regions, it can be used by applications or workloads in any or all
of the regions. This simplifies high availability failover and
disaster recovery rollback.</para>
<para>In order to scale the Object Storage service to meet the workload
of multiple regions, multiple proxy workers are run and
load-balanced, storage nodes are installed in each region, and the
entire Object Storage Service can be fronted by an HTTP caching
layer. This is done so client requests for objects can be served out
of caches rather than directly from the storage modules themselves,
reducing the actual load on the storage network. In addition to an
HTTP caching layer, use a caching layer like Memcache to cache
objects between the proxy and storage nodes.</para>
<para>If the cloud is designed without a single Object Storage Service
endpoint for multiple regions, and instead a separate Object Storage
Service endpoint is made available in each region, applications are
required to handle synchronization (if desired) and other management
operations to ensure consistency across the nodes. For some
applications, having multiple Object Storage Service endpoints
located in the same region as the application may be desirable due
to reduced latency, cross region bandwidth, and ease of
deployment.</para>
<para>For the Block Storage service, the most important decisions are
the selection of the storage technology and whether or not a
dedicated network is used to carry storage traffic from the storage
service to the compute nodes.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="arch-networking-multiple">
<title>Networking</title>
<para>When connecting multiple regions together there are several design
considerations. The overlay network technology choice determines how
packets are transmitted between regions and how the logical network
and addresses present to the application. If there are security or
regulatory requirements, encryption should be implemented to secure
the traffic between regions. For networking inside a region, the
overlay network technology for tenant networks is equally important.
The overlay technology and the network traffic of an application
generates or receives can be either complementary or be at cross
purpose. For example, using an overlay technology for an application
that transmits a large amount of small packets could add excessive
latency or overhead to each packet if not configured
properly.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="arch-dependencies-multiple">
<title>Dependencies</title>
<para>The architecture for a multi-site installation of OpenStack is
dependent on a number of factors. One major dependency to consider
is storage. When designing the storage system, the storage mechanism
needs to be determined. Once the storage type is determined, how it
will be accessed is critical. For example, we recommend that
storage should use a dedicated network. Another concern is how
the storage is configured to protect the data. For example, the
recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective
(RTO). How quickly can the recovery from a fault be completed, will
determine how often the replication of data be required. Ensure that
enough storage is allocated to support the data protection
strategy.</para>
<para>Networking decisions include the encapsulation mechanism that will
be used for the tenant networks, how large the broadcast domains
should be, and the contracted SLAs for the interconnects.</para>
</section>
</section>