Updated 06Nov2014: I've updated my thoughts on the layers to take into account both things I learned since this was originally written. OpenStack is, as it name implies, a stack of services to provide "components for a cloud infrastructure solution". [1] There are layers of services, some interdependent on each other, some only dependent on the layers below it. For some time there has been a PC dance around 'labelling' projects that may or may not be at a layer that it wants to be in. Back in the day, the term 'core' was thrown around to identify the services

OpenStack Client Projects The developers of OpenStack maintain a series of library projects which are the Python interfaces to the OpenStack REST APIs and also include command-line clients: python-ceilometerclient python-cinderclient python-glanceclient python-heatclient python-keystoneclient python-novaclient python-quantumclient python-swiftclient Each project is managed through the same development process as the integrated OpenStack projects so you can expect to find the latest source on GitHub. The master branch in the project repositories should theoretically never be 'broken,' but realistically they are not tested between releases with the same vigor as the core projects. The bug and feature tracking happens on Launchpad; each of the

OpenStack command line clients are a pile of Python modules and dependencies and can be a real joy to install. On Linux there are often vendor-maintained packages available to simplify the task and capture all of the dependencies, while on Windows it is a completely different story as no version of Windows includes any version of Python out of the box. There are three layers to the Python stack to get the OpenStack clients (or any Python app really) installed and working on Windows: a Python interpreter/runtime, the Python modules that provide an interface to PyPI, and the client libraries

[Updated 01Oct2013 to correct spelling and command formatting] This is the next installment in the never-ending series of OpenStack image builds. Today's target: CentOS Image Characteristics The usual suspects are present: minimal package install serial console support timezone is Etc/UTC hostname set to instance name a single partition with root filesystem, no swap grow root filesystem to device size enable EPEL (install epel-release) enable could-init repo to get 0.7.1 A few things are still lacking: selinux is in permissive mode, make enforcing strengthen default firewall Build Tools like Oz are a good idea in theory but in practice seem to

The OpenStack Developer Summit has just concluded in Portland, OR, and by many measures was an enormous success. Enormous because there were a reported >2800 people in attendance. I never heard a breakdown of how many of those were developers but I'd guess that that number was up too. The rooms were generally full but usually only a handful of people actively participated in most sessions. And speaking of full rooms, most of the 'project-formerly-known-as-Quantum' sessions were SRO. I skipped those due to other interests but the word is none of the network vendors did. Most of my time was