operations-guide/doc/openstack-ops/preface_ops.xml

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  <title>Preface</title>

  <para>OpenStack is an open source platform that lets you build an
    Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud that runs on commodity
    hardware.</para>

  <section xml:id="introduction-to-openstack">
    <title>Introduction to OpenStack</title>

    <para>OpenStack believes in open source, open design, and open
      development, all in an open community that encourages
      participation by anyone. The long-term vision for OpenStack is
      to produce a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform
      that meets the needs of public and private cloud providers
      regardless of size. OpenStack services control large pools of
      compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data
      center.</para>

    <para>The technology behind OpenStack consists of a series of
      interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud
      infrastructure solution. Each service provides an open API so
      that all of these resources can be managed through a dashboard
      that gives administrators control while empowering users to
      provision resources through a web interface, a command-line
      client, or software development kits that support the API. Many
      OpenStack APIs are extensible, meaning you can keep
      compatibility with a core set of calls while providing access to
      more resources and innovating through API extensions. The
      OpenStack project is a global collaboration of developers and
      cloud computing technologists. The project produces an open
      standard cloud computing platform for both public and private
      clouds. By focusing on ease of implementation, massive
      scalability, a variety of rich features, and tremendous
      extensibility, the project aims to deliver a practical and
      reliable cloud solution for all types of organizations.</para>
  </section>

  <section xml:id="preface_getting_started">
    <title>Getting Started with OpenStack</title>

    <para>As an open source project, one of the unique aspects of
      OpenStack is that it has many different levels at which you can
      begin to engage with it—you don't have to do everything
      yourself.</para>

    <section xml:id="preface_using_openstack">
      <title>Using OpenStack</title>

      <para>You could ask, "Do I even need to build a cloud?" If you
        want to start using a compute or storage service by just
        swiping your credit card, you can go to eNovance, HP,
        Rackspace, or other organizations to start using their public
        OpenStack clouds. Using their OpenStack cloud resources is
        similar to accessing the publicly available Amazon Web
        Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage
        Solution (S3).</para>
    </section>

    <section xml:id="preface_plug_and_play">
      <title>Plug and Play OpenStack</title>

      <para>However, the enticing part of OpenStack might be to build your own
      private cloud, and there are several ways to accomplish this goal.
      Perhaps the simplest of all is an appliance-style solution. You purchase
      an appliance, unpack it, plug in the power and the network, and watch it
      transform into an OpenStack cloud with minimal additional configuration.</para>

      <para>However, hardware choice is important for many applications, so if
        that applies to you, consider that there are several software
        distributions available that you can run on servers, storage, and
        network products of your choosing. Canonical (where OpenStack replaced
        Eucalyptus as the default cloud option in 2011), Red Hat, and SUSE offer
        enterprise OpenStack solutions and support. You may also want to take a
        look at some of the specialized distributions, such as those from
        Rackspace, Piston, SwiftStack, or Cloudscaling.</para>

      <para>Alternatively, if you want someone to help guide you through the
      decisions about the underlying hardware or your applications, perhaps
      adding in a few features or integrating components along the way,
      consider contacting one of the system integrators with OpenStack
      experience, such as Mirantis or Metacloud.</para>

      <para>If your preference is to build your own OpenStack expertise
      internally, a good way to kick-start that might be to attend or arrange
      a training session. The OpenStack Foundation has a <link
      xlink:href="http://www.openstack.org/marketplace/training">Training Marketplace</link> where
      you can look for nearby events. Also, the OpenStack community is <link
      xlink:href="https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Training-guides">working to produce</link> open
      source training materials.</para>
    </section>

    <section xml:id="preface_roll_your_own_openstack">
      <title>Roll Your Own OpenStack</title>

      <para>However, this guide has a different audience—those seeking
        flexibility from the OpenStack framework by deploying
        do-it-yourself solutions.</para>

      <para>OpenStack is designed for horizontal scalability, so you
        can easily add new compute, network, and storage resources to
        grow your cloud over time. In addition to the pervasiveness of
        massive OpenStack public clouds, many organizations, such as
        PayPal, Intel, and Comcast, build large-scale private clouds.
        OpenStack offers much more than a typical software package
        because it lets you integrate a number of different
        technologies to construct a cloud. This approach provides
        great flexibility, but the number of options might be daunting
        at first.</para>
    </section>
  </section>
  <section xml:id="who-this-book-is-for">
    <title>Who This Book Is For</title>
    <para>This book is for those of you starting to run OpenStack
      clouds as well as those of you who were handed an operational
      one and want to keep it running well. Perhaps you're on a DevOps
      team, perhaps you are a system administrator starting to dabble
      in the cloud, or maybe you want to get on the OpenStack cloud
      team at your company. This book is for all of you.</para>
    <para>This guide assumes that you are familiar with a Linux
      distribution that supports OpenStack, SQL databases, and
      virtualization. You must be comfortable administering and
      configuring multiple Linux machines for networking. You must
      install and maintain an SQL database and occasionally run
      queries against it.</para>
    <para>One of the most complex aspects of an OpenStack cloud is the
      networking configuration. You should be familiar with concepts
      such as DHCP, Linux bridges, VLANs, and iptables. You must also
      have access to a network hardware expert who can configure the
      switches and routers required in your OpenStack cloud.</para>
    <tip>
      <para>Cloud computing is quite an advanced topic, and this book
        requires a lot of background knowledge. However, if you are
        fairly new to cloud computing, we recommend that you make use
        of the <xref linkend="openstack_glossary"/> at the back of the
        book, as well as the online documentation for OpenStack and
        additional resources mentioned in this book in <xref
          linkend="recommended-reading"/>.</para>
    </tip>
    <section xml:id="further_reading">
      <title>Further Reading</title>
      <para>There are other books on the <link
          xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org">OpenStack
          documentation website</link> that can help you get the job
        done.</para>
      <variablelist>
        <title>OpenStack Guides</title>
        <varlistentry>
          <term>OpenStack Installation Guides</term>
          <listitem>
            <para>Describes a manual installation process, as in, by
              hand, without automation, for multiple distributions
              based on a packaging system:</para>
            <itemizedlist>
              <listitem>
                <para><link
                    xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/liberty/install-guide-obs/"
                    >Installation Guide for openSUSE 13.2 and SUSE Linux
                    Enterprise Server 12</link></para>
              </listitem>
              <listitem>
                <para><link
                    xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/liberty/install-guide-rdo/"
                    >Installation Guide for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and
                    CentOS 7</link></para>
              </listitem>
              <listitem>
                <para><link
                    xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/liberty/install-guide-ubuntu/"
                    >Installation Guide for Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS)
                    Server</link></para>
              </listitem>
            </itemizedlist>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/liberty/config-reference/content/">OpenStack
              Configuration Reference</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Contains a reference listing of all configuration
              options for core and integrated OpenStack services by
              release version</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/admin-guide-cloud/">OpenStack
              Cloud Administrator Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Contains how-to information for managing an
              OpenStack cloud as needed for your use cases, such as
              storage, computing, or
              software-defined-networking</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/ha-guide/index.html">OpenStack
              High Availability Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Describes potential strategies for making your
              OpenStack services and related controllers and data
              stores highly available</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/sec/">OpenStack
              Security Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Provides best practices and conceptual information
              about securing an OpenStack cloud</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/image-guide/">Virtual
              Machine Image Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Shows you how to obtain, create, and modify virtual
              machine images that are compatible with OpenStack</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/user-guide/">OpenStack
              End User Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Shows OpenStack end users how to create and manage
              resources in an OpenStack cloud with the OpenStack
              dashboard and OpenStack client commands</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/user-guide-admin/">OpenStack
              Admin User Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>Shows OpenStack administrators how to create and
              manage resources in an OpenStack cloud with the
              OpenStack dashboard and OpenStack client <phrase
                role="keep-together">commands</phrase></para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/networking-guide/">Networking
              Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>This guide targets OpenStack administrators seeking
              to deploy and manage OpenStack Networking (neutron).</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>

        <varlistentry>
          <term><link xlink:href="http://developer.openstack.org/api-guide/quick-start/">OpenStack
              API Guide</link></term>

          <listitem>
            <para>A brief overview of how to send REST API requests to
              endpoints for OpenStack services</para>
          </listitem>
        </varlistentry>
      </variablelist>
    </section>
  </section>

  <section xml:id="how-this-book-is-organized">
    <title>How This Book Is Organized</title>

    <para>This book is organized into two parts: the architecture
      decisions for designing OpenStack clouds and the repeated
      operations for running OpenStack clouds.</para>

    <para><emphasis role="bold">Part I:</emphasis></para>

    <variablelist>
      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="example_architecture"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Because of all the decisions the other chapters
            discuss, this chapter describes the decisions made for
            this particular book and much of the justification for the
            example architecture.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="section_arch_provision"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>While this book doesn't describe installation, we do
            recommend automation for deployment and configuration,
            discussed in this chapter.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="cloud_controller_design"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>The cloud controller is an invention for the sake of
            consolidating and describing which services run on which
            nodes. This chapter discusses hardware and network
            considerations as well as how to design the cloud
            controller for performance and separation of
            services.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="compute_nodes"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter describes the compute nodes, which are
            dedicated to running virtual machines. Some hardware
            choices come into play here, as well as logging and
            networking descriptions.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="scaling"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter discusses the growth of your cloud
            resources through scaling and segregation
            considerations.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="storage_decision"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>As with other architecture decisions, storage concepts
            within OpenStack offer many options. This
            chapter lays out the choices for you.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="network_design"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Your OpenStack cloud networking needs to fit into your
            existing networks while also enabling the best design for
            your users and administrators, and this chapter gives you
            in-depth information about networking decisions.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>

    <para><emphasis role="bold">Part II:</emphasis></para>

    <variablelist>
      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="lay_of_the_land"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter is written to let you get your hands
            wrapped around your OpenStack cloud through command-line
            tools and understanding what is already set up in your
            cloud.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="projects_users"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter walks through user-enabling processes
            that all admins must face to manage users, give them
            quotas to parcel out resources, and so on.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="user_facing_operations"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter shows you how to use OpenStack cloud
            resources and how to train your users.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="maintenance"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter goes into the common failures that the
            authors have seen while running clouds in production,
            including troubleshooting.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="network_troubleshooting"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Because network troubleshooting is especially
            difficult with virtual resources, this chapter is
            chock-full of helpful tips and tricks for tracing network
            traffic, finding the root cause of networking failures,
            and debugging related services, such as DHCP and
            DNS.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="logging_monitoring"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter shows you where OpenStack places logs and
            how to best read and manage logs for monitoring
            purposes.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="backup_and_recovery"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter describes what you need to back up within
            OpenStack as well as best practices for recovering
            backups.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="customize"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>For readers who need to get a specialized feature into
            OpenStack, this chapter describes how to use DevStack to
            write custom middleware or a custom scheduler to rebalance
            your resources.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="upstream_openstack"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Because OpenStack is so, well, open, this chapter is
            dedicated to helping you navigate the community and find
            out where you can help and where you can get help.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="advanced_configuration"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Much of OpenStack is driver-oriented, so you can plug
            in different solutions to the base set of services. This
            chapter describes some advanced configuration <phrase
              role="keep-together">topics</phrase>.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="ch_ops_upgrades"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>This chapter provides upgrade information based on the
            architectures used in this book.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>

    <?hard-pagebreak?>

    <para><emphasis role="bold">Back matter:</emphasis></para>

    <variablelist>
      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="use-cases"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>You can read a small selection of use cases from the
            OpenStack community with some technical details and
            further resources.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="app_crypt"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>These are shared legendary tales of image
            disappearances, VM massacres, and crazy troubleshooting
            techniques that result in hard-learned lessons and <phrase
              role="keep-together">wisdom</phrase>.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="working-with-roadmaps"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Read about how to track the OpenStack roadmap through
            the open and transparent development processes.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="recommended-reading"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>So many OpenStack resources are available online
            because of the fast-moving nature of the project, but
            there are also resources listed here that the authors
            found helpful while learning themselves.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><xref linkend="openstack_glossary"/></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>A list of terms used in this book is included, which
            is a subset of the larger OpenStack glossary available
            online.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>
  </section>

  <section xml:id="why-and-how-we-wrote-this-book">
    <title>Why and How We Wrote This Book</title>

    <para>We wrote this book because we have deployed and maintained
      OpenStack clouds for at least a year and we wanted to
      share this knowledge with others. After months of being the
      point people for an OpenStack cloud, we also wanted to have a
      document to hand to our system administrators so that they'd
      know how to operate the cloud on a daily basis—both reactively
      and pro-actively. We wanted to provide more detailed technical
      information about the decisions that deployers make along the
      way.</para>

    <para>We wrote this book to help you:<itemizedlist role="compact">
        <listitem>
          <para>Design and create an architecture for your first
            nontrivial OpenStack cloud. After you read this guide,
            you'll know which questions to ask and how to organize
            your compute, networking, and storage resources and the
            associated software packages.</para>
        </listitem>

        <listitem>
          <para>Perform the day-to-day tasks required to administer a
            cloud.</para>
        </listitem>
      </itemizedlist></para>

    <para>We wrote this book in a book sprint, which is a facilitated,
      rapid development production method for books. For more
      information, see the <link xlink:href="http://www.booksprints.net/"
        >BookSprints site</link>. Your authors cobbled this book
      together in five days during February 2013, fueled by caffeine
      and the best takeout food that Austin, Texas, could <phrase
        role="keep-together">offer</phrase>.</para>

    <para>On the first day, we filled white boards with colorful
      sticky notes to start to shape this nebulous book about how to
      architect and operate clouds:<informalfigure>
        <mediaobject>
          <imageobject>
            <imagedata fileref="http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/operations-guide/plain/doc/openstack-ops/figures/osog_00in01.png"/>
          </imageobject>
        </mediaobject>
      </informalfigure></para>

    <para>We wrote furiously from our own experiences and bounced
      ideas between each other. At regular intervals we reviewed the
      shape and organization of the book and further molded it,
      leading to what you see today.</para>

    <para>The team includes:</para>

    <variablelist>
      <varlistentry>
        <term>Tom Fifield</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>After learning about scalability in computing from
            particle physics experiments, such as ATLAS at the Large
            Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Tom worked on OpenStack
            clouds in production to support the Australian public
            research sector. Tom currently serves as an OpenStack
            community manager and works on OpenStack documentation in
            his spare time.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Diane Fleming</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Diane works on the OpenStack API documentation
            tirelessly. She helped out wherever she could on this
            project.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Anne Gentle</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Anne is the documentation coordinator for OpenStack
            and also served as an individual contributor to the Google
            Documentation Summit in 2011, working with the Open Street
            Maps team. She has worked on book sprints in the past,
            with FLOSS Manuals’ Adam Hyde facilitating. Anne lives in
            Austin, Texas.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Lorin Hochstein</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>An academic turned software-developer-slash-operator,
            Lorin worked as the lead architect for Cloud Services at
            Nimbis Services, where he deploys OpenStack for technical
            computing applications. He has been working with OpenStack
            since the Cactus release. Previously, he worked on
            high-performance computing extensions for OpenStack at
            University of Southern California's Information Sciences
            Institute (USC-ISI).</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Adam Hyde</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Adam facilitated this book sprint. He also founded the
            book sprint methodology and is the most experienced
            book-sprint facilitator around. See <link
              xlink:href="http://www.booksprints.net"/> for more
            information. Adam founded FLOSS Manuals—a community of
            some 3,000 individuals developing Free Manuals about Free
            Software. He is also the founder and project manager for
            Booktype, an open source project for writing, editing, and
            publishing books online and in print.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Jonathan Proulx</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Jon has been piloting an OpenStack cloud as a senior
            technical architect at the MIT Computer Science and
            Artificial Intelligence Lab for his researchers to have as
            much computing power as they need. He started contributing
            to OpenStack documentation and reviewing the documentation
            so that he could accelerate his learning.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Everett Toews</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Everett is a developer advocate at Rackspace making
            OpenStack and the Rackspace Cloud easy to use. Sometimes
            developer, sometimes advocate, and sometimes operator,
            he's built web applications, taught workshops, given
            presentations around the world, and deployed OpenStack for
            production use by academia and business.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Joe Topjian</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Joe has designed and deployed several clouds at
            Cybera, a nonprofit where they are building
            e-infrastructure to support entrepreneurs and local
            researchers in Alberta, Canada. He also actively maintains
            and operates these clouds as a systems architect, and his
            experiences have generated a wealth of troubleshooting
            skills for cloud environments.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>OpenStack community members</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Many individual efforts keep a community book alive.
            Our community members updated content for this book
            year-round. Also, a year after the first sprint, Jon
            Proulx hosted a second two-day mini-sprint at MIT with the
            goal of updating the book for the latest release. Since
            the book's inception, more than 30 contributors have
            supported this book. We have a tool chain for reviews,
            continuous builds, and translations. Writers and
            developers continuously review patches, enter doc bugs,
            edit content, and fix doc bugs. We want to recognize their
            efforts!</para>

          <para>The following people have contributed to this book:
            Akihiro Motoki, Alejandro Avella, Alexandra Settle,
            Andreas Jaeger, Andy McCallum, Benjamin Stassart, Chandan
            Kumar, Chris Ricker, David Cramer, David Wittman, Denny
            Zhang, Emilien Macchi, Gauvain Pocentek, Ignacio Barrio,
            James E. Blair, Jay Clark, Jeff White, Jeremy Stanley, K
            Jonathan Harker, KATO Tomoyuki, Lana Brindley, Laura
            Alves, Lee Li, Lukasz Jernas, Mario B. Codeniera, Matthew
            Kassawara, Michael Still, Monty Taylor, Nermina Miller,
            Nigel Williams, Phil Hopkins, Russell Bryant, Sahid
            Orentino Ferdjaoui, Sandy Walsh, Sascha Peilicke, Sean M.
            Collins, Sergey Lukjanov, Shilla Saebi, Stephen Gordon,
            Summer Long, Uwe Stuehler, Vaibhav Bhatkar, Veronica
            Musso, Ying Chun "Daisy" Guo, Zhengguang Ou, and ZhiQiang
            Fan.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>
  </section>

  <section xml:id="how-to-contribute-to-ops-guide">
    <title>How to Contribute to This Book</title>

    <para>The genesis of this book was an in-person event, but now
      that the book is in your hands, we want you to contribute to it.
      OpenStack documentation follows the coding principles of
      iterative work, with bug logging, investigating, and fixing. We
      also store the source content on GitHub and invite collaborators
      through the OpenStack Gerrit installation, which offers reviews.
      For the O'Reilly edition of this book, we are using the
      company's Atlas system, which also stores source content on
      GitHub and enables collaboration among contributors.</para>

    <para>Learn more about how to contribute to the OpenStack docs at
        <link xlink:href="http://docs.openstack.org/contributor-guide/">OpenStack
        Documentation Contributor Guide</link>.</para>

    <para>If you find a bug and can't fix it or aren't sure it's
      really a doc bug, log a bug at <link
        xlink:href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-manuals">OpenStack Manuals</link>.
      Tag the bug under <guilabel>Extra</guilabel> options with the
        <literal>ops-guide</literal> tag to indicate that the bug is
      in this guide. You can assign the bug to yourself if you know
      how to fix it. Also, a member of the OpenStack doc-core team can
      triage the doc bug.</para>
  </section>

  <?hard-pagebreak?>

  <section xml:id="conventions_used_in_this_book">
    <title>Conventions Used in This Book</title>

    <para>The following typographical conventions are used in this
      book:</para>

    <variablelist>
      <varlistentry>
        <term><emphasis>Italic</emphasis></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames,
            and file extensions.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><literal>Constant width</literal></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Used for program listings, as well as within
            paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable
            or function names, databases, data types, environment
            variables, statements, and keywords.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><userinput>Constant width bold</userinput></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Shows commands or other text that should be typed
            literally by the user.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term><replaceable>Constant width italic</replaceable></term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied
            values or by values determined by context.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>

      <varlistentry>
        <term>Command prompts</term>

        <listitem>
          <para>Commands prefixed with the <literal>#</literal> prompt
            should be executed by the <literal>root</literal> user.
            These examples can also be executed using the
              <literal>sudo</literal> command, if available.</para>

          <para>Commands prefixed with the <literal>$</literal> prompt
            can be executed by any user, including
              <literal>root</literal>.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>

    <tip>
      <para>This element signifies a tip or suggestion.</para>
    </tip>

    <note>
      <para>This element signifies a general note.</para>
    </note>

    <warning>
      <para>This element indicates a warning or caution.</para>
    </warning>
  </section>
</preface>