OpenStack Workshop at SUNY Open Source Festival

On March 28th, the 4th Open Source Festival at SUNY Albany, hosted a

Workshop on OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

The workshop was presented by

• Matt Dorn a Cloud Technology Instructor with Rackspace focused on helping IT teams around the world build private clouds with OpenStack. and
• Ken Hui  a Cloud Architect/Evangelist with Rackspace focused on the Rackspace Private Cloud.

Matt and Ken brought with them a “portable cloud” composed of 14 laptops that provided the OpenStack environment for the training.

During a full-room, three hours session, over 40 participants went through an overview of the OpenStack components and received practical suggestions and resources for learning OpenStack.

Some of the main components discussed included

• Keystone: the project that provides Identity, Token, Catalog and Policy services for use specifically by projects in the OpenStack family. It implements OpenStack’s Identity API.
• Nova: the project name for OpenStack Compute, a cloud computing fabric controller, the main part of an IaaS system. Individuals and organizations can use Nova to host and manage their own cloud computing systems. Nova originated as a project out of NASA Ames Research Laboratory.
• Cinder: the project that implement services and libraries to provide on demand, self-service access to Block Storage resources. Provide Software Defined Block Storage via abstraction and automation on top of various traditional backend block storage devices.

Then to demonstrate the capabilities of OpenStack, Matt and Ken guided participants through the OpenStack portal and gave everyone an opportunity to launch cloud computing resources from their own laptops.

The workshop participants demonstrated great excitement about cloud technologies, and learned about the the growing demand for practitioners in this area.

The open source nature of OpenStack makes it a natural choice for organizations that are deploying private clouds. That is, clouds that are hosted inside the institution’s firewall to provide services to selected users.