Ryan Lane, an operations engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote a blog post about how he is using OpenStack to build a cloud infrastructure for testing and development. OpenStack is the open-source initiative that provides an infrastructure for building cloud environments.
Lane wants an infrastructure that does not require operations to manage user accounts, virtual machines, DNS entries or IP addresses. Lane also wants an environment in which developers can add additional infrastructure without operations support. Sound to good to be true? Lane seems to have it all worked out.
Here’s what Lane has in place:
- OpenStack as the virtualization technology
- PowerDNS with an LDAP backend for DNS entries
- Puppet with an LDAP backend for puppet nodes
- MediaWiki as the virtual machine manager
Using MediaWiki as a virtual machine manager is pretty interesting. Lane has written an extension, OpenStackManager, specifically for this. He’s also written an LDAP Authentication extension which is being employed in this stack as well.
Is this a picture of a cloud stack we will see in 2011? What do you think?
