Emerging trends in OpenStack

One of the most interesting things about the way that OpenStack has evolved over its short history is the vast number of projects that have sprung up around the core set of compute, network, and storage services. As of the Queens release of OpenStack, there were almost 60 projects in the Big Tent and about 40 are a part of the release. These projects can be broadly lumped into two categories—those that automate additional infrastructure components and those that manage the installation, configuration, and life cycle of OpenStack itself.

This first set of projects are typically patterned after analogues in Amazon Web Services and provide a fuller stack of services to be used in application deployments. The second set of projects contain configuration management code like the Puppet modules we used in earlier chapters to deploy OpenStack and common services and libraries, which are used by the other services. Other services enable operations tools and provide support...