Chapter 2. Taking an OpenStack test-drive
This chapter covers
- Using DevStack to take a test-drive with OpenStack
- Preparing an environment for DevStack
- Configuring and deploying DevStack
- Interacting with the OpenStack Dashboard
- Understanding the OpenStack tenant (project) model
- Creating virtual machines with OpenStack
In chapter 1 you learned many of the benefits of OpenStack and how OpenStack fits into the cloud ecosystem. But now that you have an idea of what OpenStack can do for you, you may wonder what it looks like. What will the experience be like for your users? This chapter lets you test-drive OpenStack through the use of DevStack, a rapid OpenStack deployment tool, and answers these questions.
DevStack lets you interact with OpenStack on a small scale that’s representative of a much larger deployment. You can quickly deploy or “stack” (as fellow OpenStackers call it) components and evaluate them for production use cases. DevStack helps you deploy the same OpenStack components found in large multiserver environments on a single server, as shown in figure 2.1. Without knowing a great deal about OpenStack and without the need for a bunch of hardware, you can use DevStack to get the OpenStack experience, just on a smaller scale.
