OpenStack Mitaka Design Summit

Amazon Web Services has had regions across the globe and Availability Zones (AZ) as standard offering for years. The tiering and choice of locations is best practice that OpenStack architects should embrace as they build a blueprint for geo-distributed OpenStack clouds. The notion of different regions and AZ allows smaller “blast zones” in the event of outages plus enables use cases such as active/standby clouds, tenant data replication and new tiered application architectures. All of these use cases are extremely attractive but if not undertaken correctly, a geo-distributed OpenStack endeavour can be unpredictable, costly and complex.

The cornerstone to a winning Geo-Distributed OpenStack Clouds architecture is the networking layer.  While there are existing network architectures that leverage existing routing protocols and tunnelling mechanisms, OpenStack offers an opportunity to rethink and implement a lightweight mechanism based on a radically simpler software based implementation.

In this session, learn how PLUMgrid is leveraging existing OpenStack compatible technologies and extending it to support a geo-distributed OpenStack cloud architecture. We will delve into technical implementation, physical infrastructure considerations and use case examples.