A few days ago while
working for one of my Cloud computing projects, I stumbled upon an open source
cloud computing platform for private and public clouds called: OpenStack. After
burning mid night oil for a few days I was finally able to deploy it
successfully on my virtual machine. The efforts that I put during this time had
me intrigued enough to write a blog about the organics of open source software’s
like OpenStack.
OpenStack provides
users with ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform and predominantly
provides Infrastructure as a service. It also provides users with computing and
networking resources. So users have hardware, software and applications delivered
to them through a web browser.
Listed below are a few
advantages of using OpenStack
·
Users can have public
and private clouds available anytime on any PC and access it via a web browser.
·
Simple to integrate,
scalable, and has a dashboard which makes it easy to use.
·
Provides unlimited
storage and has mechanisms to prevent data corruption.
So what are we waiting
for? Let’s get started and setup OpenStack on your Linux machines
Step 1: I would
suggest you to install OpenStack in your virtual machine and not on your main
host. Reason for this being OpenStack needs its own dedicated environment to
run. You can use VMWare or Virtual Box to create your virtual machine and then
run Ubuntu in them.
Step 2: Increase the
RAM of the virtual machine to at least 1.5GB and memory to at least 6GB.
OpenStack seems to get hungry very soon so it’s preferable to have this memory
lest your VM may be really slow.
Step 3: We need to
create a user named “stack” for installation to be successful
Step 4: Also we need
to give all privileges to “stack”
This will open the
file visudo. In this file we need to set the following data
Step 5: Now we can
logout from the root and login again as the user “stack”. We can install “git”
if it’s not present already.
Step 6: Download the
OpenStack code from github. The code should be stored in “/var” so we first do cd /var and run the below command
To avoid any
permission issues we need to execute the below commands
Step 7: We need to now
create a localrc file which stores the passwords and login information. Path
for this file is /var/devstack/localrc
Contents of this file
Set IP address = VM
eth0 IP address. It can be found by running ifconfig command in the terminal.
Step 8: Run ./stack.sh from the path /var/devstack.
Once it completes it will show the below screen
Step 9: You can use Mozilla
to login to OpenStack Horizon dashboard. Use your IP as shown in the above figure:
http://10.0.0.14. The username and the password to be used are also mentioned
at the end of the compilation.
So we have
successfully deployed OpenStack on your PC. You can create instances and
volumes using the same.
Recently during a discussion with a bunch of friends we were speaking about how Netflix can charge as little as $8 per month for its services?? Yup everything is built on open source software!! They have the entire infrastructure established so it's an easy task for them.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth” is a saying of the past now. As for the developers what’s more apt is: “The more, the merrier”. More intelligent developers ensure that the software is more stable and secure than the proprietary software because anyone can spot a bug and even have the code to analyze and fix it.
“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.” - Frank Zappa
So it's time for all of us to divulge our attention towards using all the open
source technologies available out there!!
References:
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