Ever wondered what's really inside the stacks !
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I support TelcoCloud datacenters which are managed by Red Hat OpenStack. This cloud infrastructure hosts multiple Telco applications, known as Virtual network functions (VNFs) & All the VNFs are created & managed by the OpenStack platform only. This use case has saved a significant amount of CAPEX for telecom operators by converting the traditional hardware-based applications in the form of VNFs. Operations & maintenance tasks are also easy now.
Pros
- Scaling of application components (VMs).
- Managing the networking between virtual machines.
- Management of VNFs & the underlying infrastructure.
- Availability & uptime of VMs because of features like VM migration & evacuation.
Cons
- User management really needs improvement - when compared to AWS or GCP.
- Security of the overall platform needs to be improved.
- The whole architecture needs to be modular which is not. Ex - Upgrading any particular component (nova, neutron, cinder) should be possible without upgrading the whole Red Hat OpenStack version.
- The creation of HEAT templates for complex applications is still a challenge & has a dependency on external tools.
- Stack creation still requires parameters modification at controllers & compute because of the complex nova-scheduler algorithm.
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for - any organization where you have people who already have expertise on OpenStack, Linux & IP networking. Otherwise, the maintenance & operations will be difficult. When the number of deployed VMs reaches its capacity, it becomes very difficult to manage Red Hat OpenStack because there are no in-built fault management & performance management tools available within Red Hat OpenStack.
Not suited for - Organizations where people have a culture of working on automated GUI-based tools. Here VMware wins over Red Hat OpenStack. Also where you have mission-critical applications where downtime cannot be tolerated.
