Chapter 1. The Troubleshooting Toolkit

OpenStack is one of the fastest growing open source projects in history. It is rapidly becoming the standard for open source, public and private clouds. Since its first release in 2010, there have been 12 major releases, with the thirteenth being planned as of the writing of this book. The project has grown from a few thousand lines of code written by dozens of developers to over 2.6 million lines of code from over 2,100 contributors. OpenStack originally started with two projects, Object Storage (Swift) and Compute (Nova). OpenStack has grown to include over 40 projects. This huge amount of commitment and contribution has led to the momentum that OpenStack enjoys today.

OpenStack has become very popular among companies and organizations because it allows them to provide public and private clouds to their employees, partners, customers, and constituents. In addition, the vibrant community around OpenStack allows its adopters to avoid lock in and gives them freedom to work with the technologies of their choice. As an open source project, those who adopt it have the freedom to work with the community and add functionalities and features as they see fit. This flexibility has enticed hundreds of organizations to join this community, many dedicating developers to the cause.

OpenStack is extremely powerful, but it is not without complexity. One of the side effects of its rapid growth and large community involvement is the fact that things often change quickly. New projects are added regularly, and along with those projects, come new functionalities. As the community finds better ways to implement things, it often necessitates change. As the projects begin to get more and more integrated, it becomes very important to understand how these projects flow and interrelate. While the growth of OpenStack has been rapid, the development of OpenStack talent has not kept pace. As a result, inpiduals with OpenStack skills are in high demand.

OpenStack requires operators with the ability to identify, isolate, and troubleshoot errors that might arise in the environment. Troubleshooting OpenStack is not always straightforward because the functionality of an OpenStack cloud is delivered by several different projects all working together under the OpenStack umbrella. In addition, the OpenStack projects are further augmented by external open source technologies. With OpenStack's power and flexibility comes the challenge of pinpointing the source of errors and problems. While this challenge is real, it is by no means insurmountable.

In this book, we will show you how to find success with OpenStack troubleshooting. We will introduce you to inside tips and a winning methodology to troubleshoot your OpenStack cluster. It is assumed that you are familiar with the basic Linux administration, cloud computing in general, and OpenStack in particular. We will walk you through a set of useful tools to troubleshoot OpenStack, and we will provide a step-by-step guide to address common problems in installation, performance, availability, and automation. We will focus on central OpenStack projects, including those providing compute, storage, and networking. By the time we reach the end of this book, you will be better prepared to tackle the OpenStack troubleshooting challenges that may come your way. You will have a better understanding of how OpenStack works under the hood, and this understanding, along with the tips and methodologies presented in this book, will make you an efficient and confident OpenStack troubleshooter.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The project overview of OpenStack
• Basic troubleshooting methods and tools
• Installing packages