Optimizing Your CI/CD Pipeline with an OpenStack-Powered Private Cloud

When you’re scaling your development team or launching new features at breakneck speed, your CI/CD pipeline becomes the backbone of your entire operation. But what happens when that backbone starts creaking under pressure? For many developers and DevOps teams, the answer lies in rethinking where and how their pipelines run.

If you’re currently wrestling with unpredictable cloud bills, sluggish build times, or the dreaded “noisy neighbor” problem, you’re not alone. The good news? There’s a smarter way to architect your CI/CD infrastructure that addresses these pain points while giving you the control and performance your team deserves.

The Hidden Costs of Traditional Cloud CI/CD

Most development teams start their CI/CD journey on public cloud providers or virtual private cloud (VPC) services. It seems like the logical choice with quick setup, pay-as-you-go pricing, and seemingly infinite scalability. But as your team grows and your deployment frequency increases, cracks in this foundation begin to show.

Overprovisioning: The Silent Budget Killer

You know the drill: your team provisions instances with more CPU, RAM, and storage than actually needed. Maybe you’re unsure about exact resource requirements, or you’re planning for peak usage, or you simply don’t want development delays due to resource constraints. Since public cloud providers charge for allocated resources rather than actual usage, this creates significant waste.

Teams end up paying on-demand prices for resources that might only run a few hours per day for bursty workloads. The alternative of underprovisioning leads to queued builds, slow test execution, and delayed deployments that frustrate developers and slow down your entire delivery pipeline.

The Noisy Neighbor Problem

Performance inconsistency plagues shared cloud infrastructure. Other tenants’ workloads can affect your build performance, making it difficult to establish reliable performance baselines. Cloud providers may allocate different CPU generations or storage types even for the same instance class, leading to variable build performance that makes capacity planning nearly impossible.

Environment Sprawl and Hidden Costs

Automated pipelines that spin up test environments may fail to clean them up properly, leaving forgotten VMs, storage volumes, and network resources running indefinitely. Network transfer costs like pulling dependencies, Docker base images, and moving artifacts between regions often catch teams off-guard in their cloud bills.

Build processes are typically I/O intensive, involving compiling, packaging, and downloading dependencies. Standard cloud storage may not provide sufficient IOPS, forcing teams to pay premium prices for high-performance storage or accept slower builds that impact developer productivity.

Why Private Cloud Infrastructure Changes Everything

This is where OpenMetal’s hosted private cloud powered by OpenStack fundamentally changes the game. Rather than fighting the limitations of public cloud infrastructure, you get dedicated hardware designed specifically for workloads like CI/CD pipelines.

True Isolation Without the Public Cloud Penalties

With OpenMetal, you can run an essentially unlimited number of isolated Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) on your own dedicated hardware. Different departments or development teams can operate in their own sandboxed environments simultaneously, all sharing the same underlying resources without typical public cloud concerns like monitoring usage quotas or dealing with noisy neighbors.

Since all VPCs run on the same private cloud hardware and are consolidated under a single fixed-cost bill, you get a highly cost-efficient model that avoids paying for unused capacity. Unlike standard VPC or public cloud providers, you own and control the underlying hardware, which delivers better security and performance while still providing the benefits of quick-to-deploy on-demand infrastructure.

Network Performance That Doesn’t Break the Bank

All resources communicate securely over a private network, and OpenMetal provides a generous amount of egress with all tiers. Any usage that surpasses the included allotment is billed by the Mbps, calculated at the 95th percentile for the billing period. This method provides more predictable and controlled costs by smoothing out brief periods of high bandwidth usage; a refreshing change from per-gigabyte transfer charges that can surprise you at month-end.

Hardware Built for Performance

The underlying infrastructure features fast NVMe drives, powerful Xeon processors, and 20Gbps private networking. When the OpenInfra Foundation’s Zuul project needed faster deployment times for their CI/CD workloads, they found that VMs were spinning up in under 30 seconds on average. In some cases, 10x faster than what they experienced with certain public cloud vendors.

The OpenStack Advantage for CI/CD

OpenMetal’s hosted private cloud is built on a foundation of a three-server hyperconverged cluster called the Cloud Core, powered by OpenStack and Ceph. This provides a powerful, API-first platform with no licensing costs, covering compute (VMs), storage, and software-defined networking with easy Kubernetes deployment capabilities.

Flexible Networking for Complex CI/CD Needs

Using OpenStack projects and Neutron’s virtual networking (VxLANs), every CI job can run in its own completely separate network and security domain. This level of isolation supports the most demanding security and compliance requirements while maintaining the flexibility to spin up new environments quickly.

The networking capabilities provide up to 20Gbps private bandwidth and 2Gbps of public internet access per server, with customer hardware residing on dedicated VLANs preconfigured for VxLAN traffic. This setup allows for the creation of multiple autonomous virtual private clouds, each with its own routers, switches, VPNs, load balancers, and firewalls.

Storage That Scales with Your Workloads

The storage system is powered by Ceph, providing high-availability cloud storage that supports various configurations including block storage with multiple performance and resiliency tiers, S3-compatible object storage, and direct disk access via LVM for maximum performance.

This is particularly valuable for CI/CD workloads because Ceph supports fast spin-up of test data volumes and reliable object storage for build artifacts. For teams with large data needs, standalone storage clusters can scale to over 20 petabytes.

Security and Compliance Built-In

Security is addressed through multiple layers, including DDoS protection, firewall rules at the hardware node level, and 24/7/365 onsite data center security. Our data centers hold numerous certifications, including SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI-DSS, NIST 800-53/FISMA, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.

Real-World Performance: The Zuul Case Study

When the OpenInfra Foundation’s Zuul project needed to scale their complex CI/CD infrastructure, they turned to OpenMetal for a solution. Zuul is an open source program that drives continuous integration, delivery, and deployment systems with a focus on project gating and interrelated projects.

The Zuul project uses a network of multiple cloud providers to spin up resources for testing protocols across all OpenInfra projects in active development, including StarlingX, OpenDev, and Airship alongside OpenStack. One of their constant challenges was lag and inconsistencies that led to longer wait times to complete test jobs.

The Implementation

OpenMetal provisioned a hyperconverged cluster of six servers including the Cloud Core Standard and three additional Large Computes to satisfy Zuul’s explosive workload requirements. Each CI testing instance requires at least 8vCPU/8GB RAM to process complex workflows.

The configuration included:

• Three Cloud Core Standard servers: Intel Xeon D-2141I CPU @ 2.20GHz, 16 Cores/Threads, 128 GB RAM, and 3.2 TB NVMe each
• Three Large Computes: Intel Xeon Silver 4210R CPU @ 2.40GHz, 40 Cores/Threads, 512 GB RAM, and 3.2 TB NVMe each

The Results

With optimizations, this configuration provided access to about 50 VMs. In the first week of implementation, the Zuul project used these 50 VMs to create and destroy an average of 164 VMs per day, mapping out to approximately 5,000 VMs in the first month.

The 17TB NVMe configuration helped achieve deployment times where VMs were spinning up in under 30 seconds on average, and in some cases, 10x faster than what Zuul experienced with certain public cloud vendors providing infrastructure to their project.

Implementing Your OpenStack-Powered CI/CD Strategy

Start with Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is crucial for cloud-based CI/CD success. With OpenMetal’s OpenStack platform, you get full access to all APIs for automation and management, with no license fees for any supplied OpenStack features.

Since OpenMetal Clouds are validated against rigorous integration testing and OpenStack’s native API capabilities, you can make cloud resources immediately and reliably available to your CI/CD systems with minimal code changes. The platform supports Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform and Ansible out of the box.

Design for Scalability

Cloud platforms excel at facilitating scalability in CI/CD processes by providing dynamic environments where resources can be provisioned and de-provisioned in response to changing pipeline requirements.

With OpenMetal, you could start with just a Small Cloud Core and add additional hardware in less than an hour to scale up resource availability and increase the number of instances available for your CI/CD workloads. The on-demand nature means these resources are immediately available after addition.

Implement Proper Monitoring and Feedback Loops

Your private cloud includes Day 2 monitoring to assist with operational management. This provides real-time analysis of your applications and cloud infrastructure health, creating continuous feedback loops that provide insights on user behavior and application performance.

Additionally, teams benefit from direct access to cloud engineers via Slack for questions and support, something you won’t get with public cloud providers!

Security Best Practices

Security integration in CI/CD involves integrating security practices into every phase of the software development cycle. This includes automated security testing, vulnerability scanning, and compliance checks throughout your pipeline.

With OpenMetal’s multi-layered security approach and compliance certifications, you can focus on application-level security while the infrastructure security is handled by the platform.

Cost Optimization Strategies

Predictable Pricing Models

Unlike usage-based billing that can lead to surprise costs, OpenMetal’s fixed-cost model provides reliable IT infrastructure budget forecasting. This is particularly important for CI/CD workloads where usage can spike unpredictably during crunch times or when multiple teams are working on critical fixes.

Resource Efficiency

Since you’re not paying for individual VMs or storage volumes, you can provision development, testing, staging, and production environments without worrying about idle time charges. This allows for more realistic testing scenarios and better resource utilization across your entire development lifecycle.

Reduced Data Transfer Costs

With all resources communicating over private networks and generous egress allowances, you can eliminate many of the data transfer charges that accumulate when moving artifacts between public cloud regions or availability zones.

Getting Started With Your Private Cloud CI/CD

The beauty of OpenMetal’s approach is that migration doesn’t require a complete overhaul of your existing processes. If you’re already using OpenStack-native automation tools and technologies, integration with your multi-cloud infrastructure is seamless.

Teams can start with a proof of concept deployment to validate performance improvements and cost savings before committing to a full migration. The platform’s API-first design means you can gradually migrate workloads while maintaining your existing CI/CD tools and processes.

For teams ready to make the transition, OpenMetal provides a cloud deployment calculator to help size your infrastructure needs and estimate costs upfront.

The Future of CI/CD Infrastructure

As development teams face increasing pressure to deliver faster while maintaining quality, the infrastructure supporting CI/CD pipelines becomes increasingly important. The combination of CI/CD with cloud computing creates more dependable and scalable software delivery processes, but only when that cloud infrastructure is properly architected for the workload.

Moving from public cloud to a private OpenStack-powered solution isn’t just about cost savings, though those are significant. It’s about gaining the control, performance, and predictability that modern development teams need to stay competitive.

Your CI/CD pipeline is too important to leave to chance. When builds are faster, deployments are more reliable, and costs are predictable, your entire team can focus on what they do best: building great software that serves your users.

Ready to see how an OpenStack-powered private cloud can transform your CI/CD pipeline? Contact OpenMetal’s cloud team to discuss your specific requirements and explore a proof of concept tailored to your workflow.

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