Garanti del Talento

dgt_plat10 – OpenStack Architecture

Module Title: dgt_plat10 – OpenStack Architecture

Description:

OpenStack is the most widely used open source software for building public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds, and the foundation of many European sovereign cloud offerings. This module explains how its services fit together to provide compute, networking and storage on demand through APIs, the same way a public cloud does, but on hardware you control.

Module Objectives:

  1. The Cloud Model: Understand projects, quotas, regions and availability zones, and how OpenStack exposes infrastructure through REST APIs.

  2. Core Services: Learn the role of Keystone (identity), Nova (compute), Neutron (networking), Glance (images), Cinder (block storage), Swift (object storage) and Placement.

  3. Supporting Services: Get to know Horizon (dashboard), Heat (orchestration), Octavia (load balancing), Barbican (secrets), Designate (DNS) and Manila (shared file systems).

  4. Control Plane Architecture: See how API services, schedulers, message queue (RabbitMQ) and database (MariaDB/Galera) interact, and which components must be highly available.

  5. Storage Back Ends: Understand why Ceph is the most common storage back end for Glance, Cinder and object storage in OpenStack clouds.

Module Content:

  • The life of a VM: Following a server create request from the API, through Keystone, Placement and the Nova scheduler, down to the hypervisor and Neutron ports.

  • Neutron networking: Provider and self-service networks, routers, floating IPs, security groups and the OVN back end.

  • Multi-tenancy: Domains, projects, roles and application credentials for automation.

  • Release cycle: Six-month releases, SLURP upgrade cadence and the role of the OpenInfra Foundation.

  • OpenStack and Proxmox: How an OpenStack cloud differs from the virtualization layer used by the GDT lab, and when each one fits.

Hands-on lab in natural language:

Students use the OpenStack command-line client, driven through natural-language instructions to the AI agent, to explore a lab cloud: create a project network, a router, a security group and a server with a floating IP, then ask the agent to explain every API call it made. Students verify the result from Horizon and by connecting to the instance.

Target Audience:

This module is for students who have completed the Linux, DevOps and Containers modules, and for system administrators, DevOps engineers and SREs who want to move towards Platform Engineering. Experience with Kubernetes is recommended.

The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy