Getting the most performance out of Openstack, and NFV

· 3 min read

By now, most IT staff has either had a chance to deploy OpenStack, or at least are familiar with what it is and what benefits it offers. We’ve moved past the installer race, the fragmentation of “as-a-service” components, and endless TCO calculators. The ecosystem and community has reached a maturity stage where the media and industry alike are calling OpenStack “boring“. Don’t be fooled, all of these are good things. They’re a product of fast-paced innovation seeing a settling of opinions and decision making. OpenStack has reached a maturity point that Linux also hit earlier on in its journey. As linux was (and still is) an incredibly capable and cost-effective option for an OS, OpenStack is also an incredibly capable and cost-effective option for private or public cloud. But now what? What’s next? The answer is deeper and more efficient capability, addressing more edge use-cases, and general polish and integration of all the development that’s happened to date. The low-hanging-fruit development is over, we’re deeper into the less exciting and less headline grabbing work; maximizing the assets as much as we can.

There’s been a lot of blog traffic regarding tips and tricks, technologies to consider for different use-cases, etc. Given the recent explosion in NFV development and adoption, I’ll highlight the ones that I think provide the most benefit in the area to try and cut down on the amount of reading needing to be done. Here we go:

  1. Getting the most out of your instances. This is a great summary on the options available to maximize function and performance of OpenStack instances.
  2. Helpful deployment and operations management tips. These are great suggestions on working smartly with new deployments, and maintaining them throughout the lifecycle.
  3. Operations must-have: dynamic ansible inventory for TripleO. If you’re doing ad-hoc maintenance on your cloud outside of tripleo, you’d be silly to not use ansible and its dynamic inventory.

NFV specific material:

  1. What OSP technologies should I look at to help scale and tune for network intensive workloads?
  2. Now that we know what technologies are available, if I have “x” workload, which options should I tune?
  3. OVS-DPDK with multi-queue, and further NFV performance tuning:
  4. Tuning for zero packet loss in Red Hat OpenStack Platform, 3 part series:

If you have any questions, or come across anything else that you think should be added – let me know! Happy management and tuning.