5 Steps To Build Self-Healing OpenStack Clouds

Want to prevent downtime and build a cloud infrastructure that fixes itself automatically? Here’s how to build a self-healing OpenStack cloud in five steps:

1. Set Up Monitoring and Alerts: Use tools like Monasca and Aodh to detect issues early and set up actionable alerts.
2. Automate Diagnostics: Deploy tools like Vitrage for root cause analysis and Congress for policy enforcement to analyze and prevent failures.
3. Design Remediation Workflows: Automate recovery with Mistral workflows, custom scripts, and configuration management tools like Ansible.
4. Enable Auto-Scaling and High Availability: Use Senlin for cluster management, Heat for orchestration, and Masakari for instance recovery.
5. Use Ceph for Self-Healing Storage: Configure Ceph for data replication, rebalancing, and seamless integration with OpenStack services.

Your cloud infrastructure will be able to detect, diagnose, and recover from issues automatically, reducing manual intervention and downtime.

Quick Overview of Tools and Features

Ready to get into all the details? Let’s get started!

Step 1: Set Up Monitoring and Alerts

OpenStack Monasca is an important tool for monitoring in self-healing cloud environments. OpenMetal’s hosted private clouds come with OpenStack pre-integrated, simplifying the deployment of tools like Monasca and Aodh for monitoring and alerting.

Monitoring with OpenStack Monasca

Monasca offers monitoring-as-a-service, gathering metrics on resource usage, network performance, service health, and custom application data. It supports both real-time monitoring and historical data analysis, helping you spot trends and anticipate potential problems before they grow.

Setting Up Alerts with Aodh

Aodh complements Monasca by adding advanced alerting features. For instance, you can set up an alarm to monitor CPU usage exceeding 90%, which helps detect resource bottlenecks early.

When configuring Aodh, make sure your alerts include:

• A clear explanation of the issue
• Details about the affected components
• Severity levels
• Suggested actions to resolve the problem

Connecting to External Monitoring Tools

OpenStack’s API-based structure makes it easy to integrate with third-party monitoring tools, giving you a centralized view of your infrastructure. Make sure to verify API compatibility, maintain consistent metrics, and align alerts across systems when integrating.

In OpenMetal’s hosted private clouds, monitoring Ceph is especially important to keep its self-healing capabilities running smoothly. Once monitoring and alerts are in place, the next step is automating diagnostics for quicker issue resolution.

Step 2: Implement Automated Diagnostics

After setting up monitoring in Step 1, the next step is to add automated diagnostics. These systems work around the clock to spot and analyze potential problems before they disrupt your OpenStack cloud operations.

Deploying Vitrage for Root Cause Analysis

Vitrage is OpenStack’s tool for Root Cause Analysis (RCA). It uses a graph-based system to map out and analyze how different cloud components interact. When used in OpenMetal’s hosted private clouds, Vitrage helps by creating a clear picture of dependencies across OpenStack and Ceph components.

To get the most out of Vitrage, configure resource mapping, assign priority levels to critical systems, and set up rules to track cascading failures. Any issue can then be quickly traced back to its source.

Using Congress for Policy Control

Congress is OpenStack’s policy enforcement engine, designed to automate and standardize how policies are applied. In OpenMetal environments, it helps maintain stability by enforcing resource allocation limits and validating key configuration changes. For example, it ensures Ceph maintains the required number of data replicas to protect stored information.

Automating Health Checks

Regular health checks are a cornerstone of automated diagnostics. These checks should focus on critical areas such as:

• Compute nodes: Monitor CPU usage and memory availability.
• Storage clusters: Check Ceph cluster health and data distribution.
• Network services: Test connectivity and measure latency.

Step 3: Design Automated Remediation Workflows

After setting up automated diagnostics in Step 2, the next step is to build workflows that can resolve issues automatically as they surface. These workflows help minimize manual efforts and reduce downtime in OpenStack environments.

Using Mistral for Automation

Mistral is a powerful tool for automating issue resolution in OpenStack. For instance, if a compute node fails, Mistral workflows can:

• Detect failed services
• Attempt restarts
• Migrate instances if needed
• Update monitoring systems

When paired with OpenMetal’s hosted private clouds, Mistral also ensures storage remains consistent during recovery processes.

Writing Custom Scripts for Key Failures

Custom scripts play a major role in fixing problems, especially in network and storage areas. Here are some examples of how they can work:

Handling Network Failures:

if network_service_down:
    restart_services()
    verify_connectivity()

Addressing Storage Errors:

if storage_node_failure:
    rebalance_data()
    check_replicas()

These scripts focus on targeted actions to resolve issues efficiently.

Leveraging Configuration Management Tools

Tools like Ansible add another layer of automation by running recovery playbooks, validating system configurations, and managing services. This can help your environment stay aligned with baseline standards.

Step 4: Enable Auto-Scaling and High Availability

Setting up auto-scaling and high availability is a key part in building self-healing OpenStack clouds. These features help your cloud infrastructure handle changing workloads automatically while staying operational without interruptions.

Using Senlin for Cluster Management

Senlin simplifies scaling and recovery by managing resource clusters in OpenStack. It supports service continuity by maintaining a minimum number of active nodes and responding to failures automatically.

Here’s an example of a basic Senlin configuration that supports both scaling and healing:

cluster:
  type: OS::Senlin::Cluster
  properties:
    desired_capacity: 2
    min_size: 2
    profile: {get_resource: profile}
    policies:
      - {get_resource: auto_healing_policy}

Once you’ve set up scaling policies, you can use Heat to orchestrate these processes and ensure they’re integrated across your cloud environment.

Orchestrating Self-Healing with Heat

Heat templates provide the framework for managing auto-scaling and failover. When used with OpenMetal’s infrastructure, Heat allows for advanced scaling based on infrastructure metrics or business needs.

For example, you can configure scaling thresholds to add or remove instances based on CPU usage. To do this, create an alarm with Aodh:

aodh alarm create \
  --type gnocchi_resources_threshold \
  --metric cpu_util \
  --threshold 70 \
  --comparison-operator gt

This helps resources be allocated efficiently, avoiding overuse or underutilization.

Integrating Masakari for Instance Recovery

Masakari handles instance recovery and failover, keeping services running during failures. It works with monitoring systems to address infrastructure issues quickly and effectively.

To set up Masakari, define compute node segments and add hosts for automated failover. When paired with OpenMetal’s hosted private clouds, Masakari works alongside Ceph storage to maintain data consistency during recovery.

Step 5: Use Ceph for Self-Healing Storage

Auto-scaling and high availability cover compute and network resilience, but what about storage? That’s where Ceph comes in. Its distributed design allows for data resilience and automatic recovery, making it a big part of building self-healing OpenStack clouds.

Deploying Ceph Storage Clusters

To set up Ceph, deploy multiple Object Storage Daemons (OSDs) across nodes and configure a storage pool with data replication for redundancy.

Here’s a simple setup for creating a Ceph storage pool with replication:

ceph osd pool create volumes 128 128
ceph osd pool set volumes size 3
ceph osd pool set volumes min_size 2

This setup creates a pool with 128 placement groups and ensures three copies of your data are stored across nodes. A minimum of two copies is required for write operations, providing fault tolerance.

Configuring Data Rebalancing and Recovery

Ceph’s ability to self-heal relies on fine-tuning its rebalancing and recovery settings. Key parameters include:

osd recovery max active = 3
osd recovery op priority = 3
osd recovery max chunk = 1048576

These settings let Ceph balance recovery speed with system performance. For instance, OpenMetal’s implementation often recovers 1TB of data in under 30 minutes during node failures. Fine-tuning these parameters means your storage system can bounce back quickly from disruptions.

Ceph Setup Demonstration

Check out this video for a Ceph demonstration by our Director of Cloud Systems Architecture, Yuriy Shyyan. He guides you through the initial login process, cluster details, and important metrics like OSD partition usage. He’ll also walk you through setting up users and configuring S3 access for object storage. Watch to the end to see him demonstrate compression mechanics and chunked uploads, giving you a better understanding of how Ceph works.

Integrating Ceph with OpenStack

To connect Ceph with OpenStack services like Cinder, Glance, and Nova, correct configuration is a must. OpenMetal simplifies this process with pre-configured templates.

Here’s an example configuration for integrating Ceph with Cinder:

[ceph]
volume_driver = cinder.volume.drivers.rbd.RBDDriver
volume_backend_name = ceph
rbd_pool = volumes
rbd_ceph_conf = /etc/ceph/ceph.conf
rbd_flatten_volume_from_snapshot = false
rbd_max_clone_depth = 5

For better performance in production, use separate storage pools tailored to specific workloads. Here’s a common setup:

Conclusion: Build a More Reliable Infrastructure By Using Self-Healing OpenStack Clouds

The five steps – monitoring, diagnostics, remediation, auto-scaling, and self-healing storage – work together to create a reliable cloud infrastructure. Each step plays a role in keeping systems running smoothly and reducing downtime:

This approach helps your systems stay operational with minimal manual effort. OpenMetal offers tailored solutions to make this process efficient and straightforward.

Why Choose OpenMetal for Self-Healing Cloud Deployments

We’ve simplified the path to self-healing clouds with pre-built templates and automated tools. Our platform integrates OpenStack services with Ceph storage, supporting quick deployment of each self-healing feature:

• Pre-built monitoring templates for fast setup
• Automated tools for diagnosing issues
• Ready-made workflows for recovery
• Optimized configurations for auto-scaling
• Seamlessly integrated Ceph storage with self-healing features

The future of self-healing cloud systems will focus on smarter automation and adaptability. By going through these five steps, businesses can achieve better efficiency, lower maintenance demands, and stronger system reliability. These self-reliant cloud systems represent the next phase of cloud computing, capable of recovering and adapting to challenges automatically.