Implementation of a Low Cost IaaS using Openstack

Tiago Rosado

and Jorge Bernardino

1,2

ISEC – Superior Institute of Engineering of Coimbra, Polytechnic of Coimbra, 3030-190 Coimbra, Portugal

CISUC – Centre of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra,

University of Coimbra, 3030-290 Coimbra, Portugal

Keywords: Openstack, IaaS, Cloud Computing, Open Source, Low Cost.

Abstract: Cloud computing has emerged as an important paradigm enabling software, infrastructure, and information

to be used as services over the network in an on-demand manner. Cloud computing infrastructures can

provide adaptive resource provisioning with very little initial investment while scaling to a large number of

commodity computing nodes. In this paper, we present Openstack, a modular and highly adaptive open

source architecture for both public and private cloud solutions. It is shown an experimental implementation

of an IaaS, built on entry-level hardware, demonstrating the hardware, and most important, the basic

software components needed to set the foundation for a solid entry-point to setup a low-cost Openstack

cloud infrastructure.

1 INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing has emerged as a cost-effective

and elastic computing paradigm for massively

scalable, fault-tolerant, and adaptive computation.

Cloud computing architectures scale to large

numbers of commodity computers and adapt to

changing hardware availability and requirements by

dynamically allocating virtualized computing nodes.

One of the main advantages of the cloud computing

paradigm is that it simplifies the time-consuming

processes of hardware provisioning, hardware

purchasing and software deployment. For example,

by decoupling the management of the infrastructure

(cloud providers) from its use (cloud tenants), and

by allowing the sharing of massive infrastructures,

cloud computing delivers unprecedented economical

and scalability benefits for existing applications and

enables new scenarios. This comes at the cost of

increased complexity in managing a highly multi-

tenant infrastructure and posing new questions on

attribution, pricing, isolation, scalability, fault-

tolerance, load balancing, etc.

Cloud infrastructures can provide adaptive

resource provisioning with very little initial

investment while scaling to massive amounts of

commodity computing nodes. Enterprise IT

Organizations focused on the cutting edge of

technology, developing new business solutions and

platforms, have a constant need of resources for

supporting their activity. Those resources could be

storage, quality assurance servers or test beds and

will imply different and specific configurations

according to each project, development team or

department. Rely on the IT department for delivery

and the provisioning of such variety, changes in

configurations for each server or infrastructure,

consumes much time and human resources.

On the premise that improvement comes from

inside, this work aims to deliver an open source

private cloud computing implementation in order to

respond IT Organizations demands regarding cost

control issues, rapid and highly customizable

infrastructure, maintaining high standards of quality,

security and robustness. Implementing an open

source private cloud computing solution avoids

vendor lock-in and will provide resources on-

demand to research and development departments

well as independence to manage them without

jeopardizes the enterprises critical IT infrastructure.

There are different offerings of cloud solutions

like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a

Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

There are many studies about Infrastructure as a

Service (IaaS) solutions focused on the study of

middleware platforms and on comparative studies

(Laszewski et al., 2012), (Bist et al., 2013) of the

different open source solutions like Openstack;

298

Rosado, T. and Bernardino, J.

Implementation of a Low Cost IaaS using Openstack.

DOI: 10.5220/0006004402980303

In Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2016) - Volume 1: ICSOFT-EA, pages 298-303

ISBN: 978-989-758-194-6

(Sefraoui., 2012), Eucalyptus or OpenNebula,

providing users a good basis in order to achieve

freedom of choice. Studies on Openstack have

shown major qualities focusing scalability and

modularity (Castillo et al., 2013), security (Chen et

al., 2010), (TaheriMonfared and Jaatun, 2011) and

good performance in high demands (Steinmetz et al.,

2012). However Openstack evolved since then

having grown the partnership of big enterprises on

the support and development, requiring an updated

study. In this paper our focus is in the

infrastructures, addressing a suitability of such

implementation using the open source cloud

provider solution from Openstack for maximizing

existing in-house resources.

The remainder of this paper is organized as

follows. Section 2 presents Openstack architecture

and service followed by the object model. Section 3

presents a use case of how to design and implement

an IaaS using Openstack. Finally, conclusions and

future work are given in Section 4.

2 OPENSTACK ARCHITECTURE

Openstack is a fully open sourced cloud solution,

released under the terms of the Apache license, for

delivering and managing Cloud IaaS originally

developed by NASA and Rackspace (Castillo et al.,

2013). At this time is governed by The Openstack

Foundation having as supporter’s companies like

Canonical, Suse, Red Hat, Nebula, HP, IBM,

Rackspace, Intel, AMD, Cisco, among others. By

being open source and free to download gives to

small players the possibility to deploying small

cloud infrastructures. Openstack is a combination of

software projects considered one of the most

complete solutions with great potential due to its

architecture, community and partner’s support

having gained so far such reliability robustness and

availability as an IaaS solution for both public and

private cloud infrastructures (Castillo et al., 2013).

2.1 Conceptual Architecture

The modular and highly configurable architecture of

Openstack enables this solution to be conceived and

tailored to fit available hardware resources. It can be

used by professional or entry level users, with small

or large number of computer nodes. This allows

enterprises to choose from a variety of

complementary services in order to meet different

needs, regarding computing, networking and storage

(Pepple, 2013). Figure 1 represents the Openstack

conceptual architecture with all native software

components, developed by companies and individual

supporters, depicting how they interact with each

other.

Figure 1: Openstack conceptual architecture.

Following, we describe those components

dividing them into five groups due to their

characteristics: Computing, Networking, Storing,

Shared, and Supporting services. Although the

supporting services are not native from Openstack’s

core, they are essential for its operation (Pepple,

2013).

2.1.1 Computing

The Nova Compute is the core software component

of Openstack solution dictating services organization

and interactions. Its own major components serve as

basis for the cloud infrastructure, relying on Glance

for Image services.

• Nova: Also known as Openstack Compute or

Nova Compute, it provides virtual servers

upon demand interacting with the hypervisors,

supporting several kinds such as KVM, Xen,

VMware or Hyper-V. It's an array of software

that provides services for cloud resource

management through its application

programming interfaces (APIs), capable of

orchestrating running instances, networks and

access control. It’s an essential service for a

basic cloud architecture implementation.

• Glance: It’s the Openstack Image service, a

lookup and retrieval system for virtual

machine (VM) images. It provides services for

discovering, registering and retrieving virtual

images through an API that allows querying of

VM image metadata, catalog and manage

large libraries of server images. It’s an

essential service for a basic cloud architecture

implementation.

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299

2.1.2 Networking

Openstack has recently gained a new component for

networking control and management, the Neutron.

• Neutron: It is a project to provide network

connectivity as a service between devices

managed by other Openstack services (e.g.

Nova). It provides capabilities for managing

dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP),

static protocols (IP’s), or virtual networks

(VLAN’s) along with other advanced policies

and topologies. Due to its architecture, it

allows users to take advantage of frameworks

(e.g. intrusion detection systems, load

balancing, virtual private networks) from

supported vendors.

2.1.3 Storing

When moving into a larger infrastructure for a wider

service it could be an option to have dedicated

servers for storage management. In this case

Openstack offers the Swift and Cinder.

• Swift: Also known as Openstack Object

Storage, Swift is a highly available,

distributed object/blob store. Allows users to

store or retrieve files. It can be used by Cinder

component to back up the VMs volumes.

• Cinder: It is known as Openstack Block

Storage or Cinder Volumes and provides

persistent block storage (or volumes) to guest

virtual machines. By working with Swift,

Cinder can use it to backup the VMs volumes.

In earlier releases of Openstack this service

was an integral part of Nova in the form of

nova-volume. Cinder will mainly interact with

Nova, providing volumes for its instances,

allowing through its API the manipulation of

volumes, volume types and volume snapshots.

2.1.4 Shared Services

These are services transversal to all infrastructures,

needed in order to put the solution in functioning.

The available services are: Keystone, Horizon, and

Ceilometer.

• Keystone: The Openstack identity is a single

point of integration for Openstack policy,

catalog, token and authentication, applying

them to users and services interactions.

Without Keystone there is no compliance

between services consequently the cloud

solutions will not be available for end users. It

is an essential service for a basic cloud

architecture implementation.

• Horizon: The Openstack dashboard is a

modular web application that provides a user

interface for cloud infrastructure management

by interacting with the public APIs off all

other services.

• Ceilometer: A new component that provides a

configurable collection of metering data in

terms of CPU and network costs available

from all other services in the platform,

delivering a unique point of contact for billing

systems.

2.1.5 Supporting Services

The supporting services are crucial for Openstack to

run, but are not part of the core components or

developed for the solution, instead they are software

from external vendors to provide internal support.

Then, we briefly describe the Database and

Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP).

• Database: By default Openstack uses MySQL

as its RDBMS for core services to store

configurations and management information.

Typically MySQL database is installed on the

main node of the infrastructure, the controller

node. It’s an essential service for a basic cloud

architecture implementation.

• Advanced Message Queue Protocol: AMQP is

the messaging technology used in Openstack

for inter-process communication. It uses by

default RabbitMQ and supports others such as

Qpid or ZeroMQ. The broker gives a common

platform for processes to send and receive

messages between them making use of little or

no knowledge of each other’s component

definitions. It’s an essential service for a basic

cloud architecture implementation.

2.2 Service Architecture

The Nova Compute is the core software component

of Openstack solution dictating services organization

and interactions, as shown in Figure 2.

This component has as major components the

API Server, Message Queue, Compute Worker or

Compute Node, Network Controller, Volume

Controller, Scheduler and Image Store.

This API Server makes available to users the

command and control of the hypervisor, storage and

networking configurations through the API

dashboard via basic http web services. A typical

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300

Figure 2: Openstack service architecture.

exchange of messages for an event request begins

with the API server receiving user request, which

authenticates and warrants that the user is permitted

to do so. Is then evaluated the availability of

resources requested by the user and, if available, the

request is delivered to the queuing engine where

services are listening to take action. When the work

is done, a message is dispatched again into the queue

for API server respond to the client.

2.3 Object Model

The object model represents the Openstack objects

and how they stand before each other, showing how

they relate, as depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Openstack Object model.

We have Users to access the cloud environment,

Keys for authentication and security purposes and

then Projects. Projects are private areas created inside

cloud computing infrastructure by the administrator.

We can have one single project with the total amount

of resources of the infrastructure or create more than

one configured individually for different purposes

with different rules, policies, and virtual machines.

Projects can be seen as smaller private clouds within

enterprise's private cloud, a unique space tailored on

demand for different departments with different needs

giving them privacy and freedom without jeopardize

other’s work.

3 IMPLEMENTATION OF AN

IAAS IN OPENSTACK

In this use case implementation we used Ubuntu

Server 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) for its

reliability regarding longer support and maintenance

and Havana has the last stable release of Openstack.

In order to provide a clear insight that is feasible

implement a robust, modular, scalable and yet still

performant low cost cloud solution we used

commercial range hardware.

3.1 Hardware Configuration

For easier understanding, Openstack uses the term

Cloud Controller to identify the main node in the

infrastructure and Compute Nodes for all the others.

The technical main characteristics are the following:

• Cloud controller: Intel® Core™ i3-3220 CPU

@ 3.30GHz, 8 GB DDR3 / 1067 MHz, 250Gb

Hard Disc Drive. Added one extra Gigabit

Ethernet controller.

• Compute Node: Intel® Core™ i3-3220 CPU @

3.30GHz, 16 GB DDR3 / 1067 MHz, 250Gb

Hard Disc Drive. Added one extra Gigabit

Ethernet controller

• Networking: Two eight port Gigabit Ethernet

switches

The network layout and the physical connections for

the cloud implementation are described in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Cloud network topology.

All the nodes in the infrastructure communicate

via two Gigabit private switches, one for VM’s

internal communications and another to ensure a

connection to the enterprise internal network. The

controller node is configured to do all the backend

processes via Nova, image management via Glance,

hosting the website via Horizon and dealing with

user identification via Keystone. All the Compute

Implementation of a Low Cost IaaS using Openstack

301

Nodes are configured with the Nova compute

services and the KVM hypervisor.

Cloud architectures exploit virtualization

techniques to provision multiple VM’s on the same

physical host so as to more efficiently use available

resources.. With this basic configuration, built on

entry level hardware, we aim to provide IT

departments of companies’ the guidelines for future

implementations and exploitation of cloud

computing technology based on Openstack modular

architecture.

3.2 Software Configuration

Having chosen and implemented this basic

architecture with legacy networking, in order to

deliver an infrastructure as a service based on

Openstack, there is no need to install all software

components described for the architecture in order

the cloud-computing environment to work.

Following we describe the software components

to be installed on each machine, the main one who

detains all the management activities for the

environment, known as Cloud Controller, and

remaining nodes or satellites named Compute

Nodes, the machines that support all the available

resources to be delivered.

3.2.1 Cloud Controller

The Cloud Controller is the core node in this

environment. Following, we describe the services to

be installed in order to provide such management

capabilities that makes this the principal machine.

Nova is the core software component and is

intended to be modular and easy to extend and adapt

having the nova-api as a broker to its services in

addition to native API Horizon. The nova-cert does

all the certificate management for the platform for

users and service’s request flow. The nova-

novncproxy is the software component that allows

the access to instances through VNC clients bridging

between public network and private network

mediating token authentication and hypervisor-

specific connections details. The connections are

authorized by the validation of user’s token provided

by nova-consoleauth. The nova-scheduler manages

users’ requests for resources selecting the most

suitable compute node for instances to run. The host

selection criteria for dispatching requests considers

factors like available physical memory, storage,

processor or network load in a two-step process,

which can be managed by the system administrator.

The nodes in the system are filtered then weighted

and sorted according to match those configured

criteria. Glance is the image service for Openstack;

it provides discovery, registration and delivery

services for disk and server images, capable to copy

or snapshot a server image to store it promptly or

use them later as a template for new servers’

creation. These capabilities are provided by glance-

api, the focal point for image requests and glance-

registry for processing images metadata like size, or

type.

In this configuration, as in all others, shared

services provided by horizon and keystone are

needed in order to ease users' requests by being a

single point of interaction between those requests

and all the services responsible for delivering them

and ensure identity among services, authentication

and system policy, respectively.

Similar to Horizon and Keystone every

Openstack implementation needs a database and a

message queue. By default and here, we use MySQL

for database management and RabbitMQ as the

message broker for services. Figure 5 below,

illustrates those services.

Figure 5: Cloud Controller software modules.

3.2.2 Compute Nodes

The compute nodes are the machines responsible for

delivering to end users the resources available in the

cloud platform under the form of virtual machines or

storage. It runs the hypervisor portion of Compute,

using KVM by default as a virtualization

infrastructure, which operates tenant virtual

machines, as well as provisioning network services

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and implementing security groups using nova-

compute and nova-network for that.

Nova has no specific hypervisor implemented.

Instead, it has an abstraction layer for compute

drivers that allow users to choose one from some

other known vendors. Figure 6 shows the Compute

Nodes software modules.

Figure 6: Compute Nodes software modules.

4 CONCLUSIONS

Cloud architectures exploit virtualization techniques

to provision multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) on the

same physical host, so as to efficiently use available

resources. The cloud computing paradigm and

available solutions in the market, regarding to

Openstack, have been implemented and explored in

various case scenarios, with major tests in academy

and industry, presenting good results for

performance, reliability and final user acceptance.

Openstack leverages due to its modular architecture

and simplicity to implement. It can be adopted into

major datacentres but also to entry-level hardware

providing enterprises a massively scalable cloud

infrastructure. Allied to the fact of being open

source, it helps on cost control, enables to deliver

rapidly on-demand resources to final users.

This work has presented an overview of

Openstack architecture, services available and how

they work and adapt into any hardware infrastructure

providing a sustainable and robust private cloud

solution.

Based on this study, future work will involve an

investigation on how to improve final user

experience with the platform and administration

activities regarding to measures and monitoring the

cloud environment.

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