Selfhosted @lemmy.world PropaGandalf @lemmy.world 6 mo. ago

ELI5: What is OpenStack? How to get started?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10542663

Well to be precise:

How does one install it? On a hypervisor? On a regular distro + KVM?

Should I go with Proxmox/Debian/some other distro?

I already installed Flatcar Linux, is this also suitable?

9 comments

Openstack is like self-hosting your own cloud provider. My 2 cents is that it's probably way overkill for personal use. You'd probably be interested in it if you had a lot of physical servers you wanted to present as a single pooled resource for utilization.

How does one install it?

From what I heard from a former coworker - with great difficulty.

What is the difference between a hypervisor/openstack/a container service (podman,docker)?

A hypervisor runs virtual machines. A container service runs containers which are like virtual machines that share the host's kernel (more to it than that but that's the simplest explanation). Openstack is a large ecosystem of pieces of software that runs the aforementioned components and coordinates it between a horizontally scaling number of physical servers. Here's a chart showing all the potential components: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Openstack-map-v20221001.jpg

If you're asking what the difference between a container service and a hypervisor are then I'd really recommend against pursuing this until you get more experience.
- To add, hypervisor is very low level, below the operating system often. Hypervisors allow you to run multiple operating systems on the same hardware.
  
  Containers are isolated processes running within an operating system using stuff like cgroups.
- It's for getting acquainted with the whole software stack. Also I have enough free time for it :) I'm also very well aware what the difference between a container service and a hypervisor are, I'm just a little overwhelmed by what open stack can do.
  
  Fair enough. Personally I'd start with their documentation then: https://docs.openstack.org/install-guide/
  
  For OS it looks like they support RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE so I'd stick with one of those.
  
  Deploying openstack seems like a very fun and frustrating experience. If you succeed, you should consider graduating from selfhosting and entering hosting business. Then, maybe post your offering on lowendtalk. Not many providers there use openstack so you might be able to lead the pack there.
  
  I used to be a certified OpenStack Administrator and I’ll say that K8s has eaten its lunch in many companies and in mindshare.
  
  But if you do it, look at triple-o instead of installing from docs.
It has been years since I played with it but OpenStack is a suite of tools to build a data center like AWS or Azure. You can get the VM bit up and running pretty quick with basic packages on an Ubuntu system if you want to play with it, but again it has been years.

What is your goal? Playing with kvm may be a better path if you want to understand virtualization.

If you want to upskill for a job, I'd see if there is a certificate to work on. Even if you don't want the cert, the curriculum might be a good starting point.
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