openstack and devstack
Welcome! Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of OpenStack and DevStack, I'd love to understand what you're hoping to get out of our session today so I can tailor our focus perfectly to your needs.
I just want a solid conceptual overview of how they both work.
To get our bearings, let's start with a high-level view of how OpenStack acts as the orchestrator for an entire private cloud before we look at how its development cousin, DevStack, fits into the picture.
The Operating System for the Cloud
Think of as a giant traffic controller for your physical hardware. Instead of manually plugging in cables, setting up hard drives, or installing operating systems on physical servers, OpenStack pools all of those physical resources—compute power, hard drive storage, and network switches—and lets you manage them through a single dashboard or unified API.
It is fundamentally an (IaaS) platform. When a developer needs a virtual machine (VM) with 4 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and a specific network firewall rule, they don't ask a system administrator to set it up manually. Instead, they make an API call to OpenStack, which instantly carves that VM out of the underlying hardware pool.
In a production environment, OpenStack is highly distributed, running across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of physical servers to ensure that if one physical machine crashes, your cloud services keep running smoothly.