Browsing by Author "Vainio, Antero"

Nowadays the Internet is being used as a platform for providing a wide variety of different services. That has created challenges related to scaling IT infrastructure management. Cloud computing is a popular solution for scaling infrastructure, either by building a self-hosted cloud or by using cloud platform provided by external organizations. This way some the challenges related to large scale can be transferred to the cloud administrators. OpenStack is a group of open-source software projects for running cloud platforms. It is currently the most commonly used software for building private clouds. Since initially published by NASA and Rackspace, it has been used by various organizations such as Walmart, China Mobile and Cern nuclear research institute. The largest production deployments of OpenStack clouds consist of thousands of physical server computers located in multiple datacenters. The OpenStack community has created many deployment methods that take advantage of automated software configuration management. The deployment methods are built with state of the art software for automating different administrative tasks. They take different approaches to automating infrastructure management for OpenStack. This thesis compares some of the automated deployment methods for OpenStack and examines the benefits of using automation for configuration management. We present comparisons based on technical documentations as well as reference literature. Additionally, we conducted a questionnaire for OpenStack administrators about the use of automation. Lastly, we tested one of the deployment methods in a virtualized environment.