In this article
- Self-Hosted OpenStack: Pros, Cons, and Considerations
- Hosted OpenStack: Pros, Cons, and Considerations
- Similarities
- Differences
- OpenMetal’s Hosted OpenStack vs DIY
- Choosing the Right Approach – DIY Self-Hosted OpenStack or a 3rd Party Hosted Service
- Deploy Your Own OpenStack Cloud in Just 45 Seconds
OpenStack, the powerful open source cloud infrastructure platform, offers nearly unlimited flexibility and control over your computing resources. But deploying and managing OpenStack can be a daunting undertaking. It has a (admittedly, deserved) reputation for being complicated to get running and keep running efficiently. This has historically limited its usage to enterprises and other large organizations that can afford the staff power to make dealing with its complications worthwhile.
With OpenMetal’s hosted OpenStack private cloud offering, we wanted to eliminate its major complexities to make it far simpler to use and increase its adoption by companies of all sizes and even individuals.
However, we still realize that hosted isn’t the way to go for everyone and every use case! Whether you want to become a true OpenStack cloud administration expert, build a completely custom deployment, run it on your own hardware, or just play around with different deployment methods and possibilities, there are plenty of situations where you may want to DIY.
If you’re debating which way to go for your own project, then this article will help you learn about the pros, cons, similarities, and differences between managing your own OpenStack deployment on your hardware versus opting for a hosted OpenStack service like OpenMetal.
Self-Hosted OpenStack: Pros, Cons, and Considerations
Pros
- Control: You have 100% control over your infrastructure, from hardware choices to network configuration and security implementations.
- Customization: Tailor OpenStack to your specific needs, optimizing it for your workloads and applications.
- Cost Savings (potentially): If you have existing hardware or can procure it at a lower cost, self-hosting can be more economical, especially for long-term use.
- Data Sovereignty: Maintain complete control over your data and its location, crucial for compliance and privacy requirements.
Cons
- Complexity: Deploying and managing OpenStack requires significant and specialized technical know-how. You need skilled personnel to handle installation, configuration, maintenance, updates, and troubleshooting.
- Upfront Investment: Requires substantial upfront investment in hardware, software licenses (if applicable), and infrastructure setup.
- Ongoing Maintenance: Ongoing maintenance, including hardware upgrades, software updates, security patching, and performance optimization, demands dedicated resources and effort.
- Scalability Challenges: Scaling your infrastructure can be time-consuming and complex, potentially requiring significant hardware investments and reconfiguration.
Hosted OpenStack: Pros, Cons, and Considerations
Pros
- Ease of Deployment: No need to worry about hardware procurement, installation, or initial configuration. The provider handles the underlying infrastructure.
- Reduced Operational Overhead: The provider manages the complexities of OpenStack maintenance, including updates and infrastructure management.
- Scalability: Easily scale your resources up or down based on your needs, paying only for what you use.
- Focus on Core Business: Free up your IT team to focus on core business objectives rather than infrastructure management.
- Predictable Costs: Typically involves a predictable monthly or usage-based pricing model, simplifying budgeting.
- Speed of Deployment (Unique to OpenMetal): Our team pioneered the 45 second OpenStack cloud deployment. Once you select your options, it’s just a short wait until you have a production-ready cloud to use.
Cons
- Less Control: You relinquish some control over your infrastructure, relying on the provider to manage, maintain, procure, and refresh the actual hardware. Unless your provider also allows custom hardware or components, you’ll also be using whatever hardware they choose to offer.
- Potential Vendor Lock-in: Switching providers can be complex, requiring careful planning and migration of your applications and data.
- Cost Considerations: Depending on your usage patterns, hosted solutions can be more expensive in the long run, especially for high-demand workloads. It’s important to pay attention to bandwidth and egress costs here – what’s included with your monthly price and any charges for overages.
Similarities
- OpenStack Core Functionality: Both options provide access to the core features and functionalities of OpenStack, including compute, storage, and networking services.
- API Compatibility: Maintain API compatibility, allowing you to use the same tools and scripts to manage your cloud environment, regardless of the deployment model.
- Community Support: Benefit from the vast OpenStack community and ecosystem for support, documentation, and resources.
Differences
- Responsibility: Self-hosting puts the work of managing the entire stack on you, while hosted solutions offload much of the operational burden to the provider.
- Cost Structure: Self-hosting typically involves higher upfront costs and ongoing maintenance expenses, while hosted solutions offer a more predictable, usage-based pricing model.
- Scalability and Flexibility: Hosted solutions generally provide greater scalability and flexibility, allowing you to adjust your resources on demand.
- Control and Customization: Self-hosting provides maximum control and customization options but requires more technical expertise.
OpenMetal’s Hosted OpenStack vs DIY
| OpenMetal’s OpenStack and Ceph | DIY | |
|---|---|---|
| Software Maintenance | OpenMetal issues updated versions two times per year that have been validated and tested on both test systems and our own OpenStack production clusters. We use Kolla-Ansible and Ceph-Adm. | You will maintain your own versions and handle the non-production testing and preparing for the upgrade. However, you can select different management tools than Kolla-Ansible and Ceph-Adm that you may be more comfortable using. |
| OpenStack Capabilities | Battle tested and iterated on over years, this version contains fixes, tweaks, and tuning that only come from having many types of workloads and many different Cloud Administrators involved. | If you have a lot of experience running OpenStack and your preferred storage architecture for OpenStack, it may be the best choice to just stay with it. You can still discuss with our team design choices. Our team can not assist past advice and ideas. |
| Testing and Training Included | We allow customers to use, free of charge for most situations, our XS and Small servers, for training and testing purposes. These three-server clusters can be spun up on demand. | You can still use our OpenStack test clusters to validate parts of your design or certain reference architectures, but it will be our version, not yours. If you wanted to see how we implemented Barbican, for example, you can check it out, but ultimately you will need to replicate what we did in your own version. |
| Opinionated | Yes, ours will be more opinionated as we have locked down a few things, made certain choices, etc. But this could be a good thing. We use Ceph throughout, then layered in LVM direct options. | Implement your own choices. You may want a two-server control plane and we do a three-server control plane. Your OpenStack reference architecture may differ. You may be a LVM/direct drive first group, we agree this is great for certain use cases. |
The above is not meant to convince you our version is the best. This decision is often driven by your history with OpenStack, your preferred OpenStack reference architecture, your required efficiency of hardware to available resources, and of course your overall priorities and budget.
Choosing the Right Approach – DIY Self-Hosted OpenStack or a 3rd Party Hosted Service
The best approach, as always, depends on your specific needs, resources, and priorities.
Choose self-hosted OpenStack if:
- You have plenty of in-house expertise and dedicated IT resources.
- You require a very high degree of control and customization.
- You have specific compliance or data sovereignty requirements.
- You have access to cost-effective hardware and resources.
Choose a hosted OpenStack service like OpenMetal if:
- You want to minimize operational overhead and complexity.
- You need a scalable and flexible solution.
- You prefer a predictable, usage-based pricing model.
- You want to focus on your core business applications instead of hardware management.
Ready to deploy your own OpenStack cloud in just 45 seconds?
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