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Operational considerations
There are a number of operational considerations that affect the design of compute-focused OpenStack clouds, including:
- Enforcing strict API availability requirements
- Understanding and dealing with failure scenarios
- Managing host maintenance schedules
Service-level agreements (SLAs) are contractual obligations that ensure the availability of a service. When designing an OpenStack cloud, factoring in promises of availability implies a certain level of redundancy and resiliency.
Monitoring
OpenStack clouds require appropriate monitoring platforms to catch and manage errors.
Note
We recommend leveraging existing monitoring systems to see if they are able to effectively monitor an OpenStack environment.
Specific meters that are critically important to capture include:
- Image disk utilization
- Response time to the Compute API
Capacity planning
Adding extra capacity to an OpenStack cloud is a horizontally scaling process.
We recommend similar (or the same) CPUs when adding extra nodes to the environment. This reduces the chance of breaking live-migration features if they are present. Scaling out hypervisor hosts also has a direct effect on network and other data center resources. We recommend you factor in this increase when reaching rack capacity or when requiring extra network switches.
Changing the internal components of a Compute host to account for increases in demand is a process known as vertical scaling. Swapping a CPU for one with more cores, or increasing the memory in a server, can help add extra capacity for running applications.
Another option is to assess the average workloads and increase the number of instances that can run within the compute environment by adjusting the overcommit ratio.
Note
It is important to remember that changing the CPU overcommit ratio can have a detrimental effect and cause a potential increase in a noisy neighbor.
The added risk of increasing the overcommit ratio is that more instances fail when a compute host fails. We do not recommend that you increase the CPU overcommit ratio in compute-focused OpenStack design architecture, as it can increase the potential for noisy neighbor issues.