Previously, we introduced DevStack and MicroStack—two very easy-to-use but relatively development- and testing-oriented deployment methods. Today, the author will present TripleO and OpenStack Charms, two powerful deployment tools with strong commercial backing.
Table of Contents
TripleO
TripleO is short for "OpenStack on OpenStack." It is one of the OpenStack projects, primarily designed to deploy and operate a production-ready OpenStack cloud using some of OpenStack's core components.
Currently, TripleO is mainly sponsored by RedHat and is the upstream deployment solution for RedHat OpenStack Platform (RHOSP).
Architecture Overview
As previously mentioned, TripleO is "OpenStack on OpenStack," meaning you end up with two OpenStack environments. One of them, called the undercloud, is responsible for deploying the overcloud. The undercloud includes essential OpenStack components needed to deploy and manage the overcloud. The overcloud is the actual OpenStack cluster deployed by the undercloud and can be used in production, staging, or test environments.
TripleO leverages several core OpenStack components, including Nova, Ironic, Neutron, Heat, Glance, and Ceilometer, to deploy OpenStack on bare metal. In the undercloud, Nova and Ironic manage the bare metal instances of the overcloud infrastructure. Neutron provides the networking environment for the overcloud, images are stored in Glance, and Ceilometer collects monitoring metrics for your overcloud.
The diagram below illustrates how to deploy the undercloud on a single bare metal server and how to distribute the overcloud across multiple bare metal servers.
OpenStack Charm
Like TripleO, OpenStack Charms is mainly sponsored by Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu distribution).
In short, Charmed OpenStack is a production-ready OpenStack distribution that simplifies OpenStack deployment and management using MAAS, Juju, and OpenStack Charms.
OpenStack Charms use different charms through Juju to deploy the entire environment, so currently it can only be installed on Ubuntu. Due to the author's limited experience with Juju, there will be no further explanation here—those who want to learn more about OpenStack Charms, or wish to test and explore, can refer to the official documentation.Official Documentation
Summary
The two deployment methods discussed above are sponsored by two major open-source companies—RedHat and Canonical—and are also the upstream versions of their respective commercial distributions. In the next article, we will cover other deployment tools, which are more community-driven but have widespread user adoption and are already being used in production environments.
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