Previous article: OpenStack: a planet to discover

The great advantage of OpenStack is that the end customer can choose whether to use the reference implementations for each project or a vendor-specific implementation for each one. The promise of OpenStack is the interoperability amongst different components from different vendors or open source projects, giving the customer the choice to find out what is the best solution for their own needs.

OpenStack could bring the following benefits to you:

• Self-service Instance life cycle management: run, reboot, suspend, resize and terminate instances.
• Management of compute resources: CPU, memory, disk, and network interfaces.
• Management of Local Area Networks (Flat, Flat DHCP, VLAN DHCP and IPv6) through programmatically allocated IPs and VLANs.
• API with rate limiting and authentication to manage who has access to compute resources and prevent users from impacting each other with excessive API utilization.
• Distributed and asynchronous architecture for massively scalable and highly available system.
• Virtual Machine (VM) image management i.e. store, import, share, and query images.
• Floating IP addresses i.e. Ability to assign (and re-assign) IP addresses to VMs.
• Security Groups i.e. flexibility to assign and control access to VM instances by creating separation between resource pools.
• Role Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure security by user, role and project.
• Projects & Quotas i.e. ability to allocate, track and limit resource utilization.
• REST-based API.

Next article: OpenStack Components