A Silicon Valley company who provides carrier-grade network services needs an OpenStack Cloud to be integrated with several of their existing systems – some of which are not commonly used.
The Challenge
Deploying an OpenStack Cloud is generally not a challenge for our Solutionauts, and this project started out no different. This organisation requires some integration with many of their existing services, including Ceph, LDAP and DNS. But in addition to these basic OpenStack components, they also required the use of DNSaaS (Designate) and Container Orchestration (Magnum) which are not so commonly used.
Another challenge we faced was that they required a fully automated deployment using their existing Puppet infrastructure, from bare-metal to ready-to-use OpenStack nodes. Everything needed to be defined as Puppet recipes, which would involve considerable work.
The Aptira Solution
Aptira developed a tailor-made Cloud solution based on OpenStack Puppet modules. We then developed custom Puppet code to meet their integration requirements as well as bridging the gap of configuring network on hosts and repos etc.
The deployment comprised of three controller nodes and a number of compute nodes, running in HA mode, with the following configurations:
- Glance, Cinder and Nova used their existing Ceph cluster as backend
- Keystone used their LDAP as backend
- Designate used their external DNS server as backend
Once the Cloud had been designed and the Puppet code developed, we executed the project remotely on their in-house infrastructure for testing.
The Result
The biggest challenge we faced whilst building this solution was to develop custom puppet code and automate the whole lifecycle from empty bare-metal node to ready-to-use OpenStack with puppet whilst controlling their servers remotely via Out-Of-Band management interface. But our Solutionauts love a challenge!
With proper testing and changes to the code, we successfully overcame these challenges, delivering the final configuration, integrating OpenStack with their existing systems and passing all acceptance tests.
