Putting your OpenStack on Autopilot  

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Last week, we released the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack beta. Consistent with Ubuntu’s heritage of making hard things simple, we created an intuitive way to provision our best-practices reference architecture of OpenStack, straight from bare metal, and to do it in a shorter time than you will take for your lunch break today.

We designed an intelligent OpenStack installer that is part of Landscape, our Ubuntu systems management product. This is a fully automated reference OpenStack deployment capability, built right into our systems management platform. We created it using Juju, Canonical’s amazing service orchestration technology.

With just a few clicks, any user can build a cloud reflecting the best practices learned through years of work by Canonical Technical Services’ cloud consultants while engaged in designing and building some of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world. What’s more, through the integration of Juju and Landscape, users can leverage our tools’ unparalleled service scale-out and systems management capabilities to make full use of the cloud they just built deploying workloads, performing capacity planning and keeping it consistent, secure and up to date.

We call this putting your OpenStack on autopilot: you metaphorically decide in which direction you want to go, and let the automation do the rest. You can see it demonstrated in this short video:

Landscape In Action: Putting OpenStack On Autopilot

Once the installation completes, you have your very own Ubuntu OpenStack cloud built to Canonical’s best practices configuration – Canonical OpenStack. Built using all that we learned over the years, in minutes. Not everyone has the time to learn all a cloud architect knows and for smaller clouds, the cost of this expertise far exceeds the cost of the hardware needed to build a cloud. We are industrialising the process of building private clouds through an automated reference architecture that will evolve and transparently carry forward users as OpenStack evolves.

Or, you can scrap what you built after you learned what you needed, release the hardware, then start all over again selecting a different configuration. With an increasing selection of components validated in our OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) at your fingertips, you will be able to quickly test your selection of technologies in the vast OpenStack ecosystem. In your lab, on your actual hardware – and with minimal time commitment, because what you built can be rebuilt again, and again as needed. You do not need to study for months and then save forever the hard-won fruit of all that work, because it just took you the span of your lunch break to build your first cloud. And your second.

Automation is not for everyone. If you want a tailored OpenStack built to your exact specifics, our renowned cloud consultants will be happy to help. On the opposite side of the control spectrum, if you prefer to manage your private cloud just as little as you do your public cloud, our BOOTstack product offers a fully-managed solution.

Try the Canonical Distribution’s latest beta release by following these instructions. Let us put your OpenStack on autopilot.

Cross-posted to Ubuntu Insights.