The Complete Guide to OpenStack
The key players in the ecosystem and how to become an OpenStack engineer
By Tamlin Magee
Open source has gone from strength to strength in the preceding decades and is now widely considered a core component of enterprise IT. It now powers much of the world, whether that is from Linux supporting the Internet, to the way software is developed for both consumer and business applications. With the advent of cloud, OpenStack came into the fore, a collection of open source cloud projects that hoped to transform the underlying infrastructure in the public and private cloud landscape.
The platform – which now supports everything from bare-metal provisioning at on-premise data centres in the Ironic project, to virtualized GPUs in Nova – has undergone a series of iterations over the years. Its latest fits in with a new parent umbrella organization, 'Open Infrastructure', that advocates open infrastructure projects whatever they might be.
There have been ebbs and flows of vendor support, and in its early days, OpenStack was derided as being overly complex, difficult to configure, and difficult to manage. But recent cycles of the platform have seen the community pushing to address that. There can be no question today that OpenStack works in the real-world: it's got backers in heavyweight rivals Red Hat and Canonical, as well as in telecommunications providers such as AT&T. And it powers one of the world's most important scientific research facilities, CERN.
In this month's Complete Guide we run through everything you need to know about the state of OpenStack today, the key players in the ecosystem, how to become an OpenStack engineer and some case studies of organizations committing to the open source infrastructure project.
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