Features and benefits
The power of OpenStack has been tested true by numerous enterprise-grade organizations, thus gaining the focus of many leading IT companies. As this adoption increases, we will surely see an increase in consumption and additional improved features/functionality. For now, let's review some of OpenStack's features and benefits.
Fully distributed architecture
Every service within the OpenStack platform can be grouped together and/or separated to meet your personal use case. Also as mentioned earlier, only the Core services (Keystone, Nova, and Glance) are required to have a functioning cloud. All other components can be optional. This level of flexibility is something every administrator seeks for an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.
Using commodity hardware
OpenStack was uniquely designed to accommodate almost any type of hardware. The underlying OS is the only dependency to OpenStack. As long as OpenStack supports the underlying OS and that OS is supported on the particular hardware, you are all set to go! There is no requirement to purchase OEM hardware or even hardware with specific specs. This gives yet another level of deployment flexibility to administrators. A good example of this can be giving your old hardware sitting around in your data center new life within an OpenStack cloud.
Scaling horizontally or vertically
The ability to easily scale your cloud was another key feature to OpenStack. Adding additional compute nodes is as simple as installing the necessary OpenStack services on the new server. The same process is used to expand the OpenStack services control plane as well. Just as with other platforms, you also can add more computing resources to any node as another approach to scaling up.
Meeting high availability requirements
OpenStack is able to certify meeting high availability (99.9%) requirements for its own infrastructure services if implemented via the documented best practices.
Compute isolation and multi-dc Support
Another key feature of OpenStack is the support to handle compute hypervisor isolation and the ability to support multiple OpenStack regions across data centers. Compute isolation includes the ability to separate multiple pools of hypervisors distinguished by hypervisor type, hardware similarity, and/or vCPU ratio.
The ability to support multiple OpenStack regions, which is a complete installation of functioning OpenStack clouds with shared services such as Keystone and Horizon, across data centers is a key function to maintaining highly available infrastructure. This model eases overall cloud administration, allowing a single pane of glass to manage multiple clouds.
Robust role-based access control
All the OpenStack services allow RBAC when assigning authorization to cloud consumers. This gives cloud operators the ability to decide the specific functions allowed by the cloud consumers. Such an example would be to grant a cloud user the ability to create instances, but deny the ability to upload new server images or adjust instance-sizing options.
