Building Private Cloud for Research Purposes

Question

I am a student and studying Computer Science. I am taking up Big Data Course this semester. As a part of curriculum, I am supposed to develop the Private Cloud using Ubuntu machines and other team needs to build up the authentication techniques for that private cloud. I am very new to bigdata and cloud even though i have basic understanding on concepts. I was going through the internet to see the resources on how to build cloud i came up with openstack which works best with ubuntu but before going any further into it i wanted to take the suggestions from stackoverflow community if they can guide me on the best tools and technology i can use to setup the private cloud. We now need to setup very small private cloud as a research project. Can anyone help me give me an idea on tools and technology please ? Appreciate the time.

Answer 1

I also did something similar last year for school ;-)

I see two technologies that you could check out for this:

• Openstack

Openstack, as you already said. Install guide for the release Mitaka here: http://docs.openstack.org/mitaka/install-guide-ubuntu/. The new version Mitaka just came out, so you may want to check liberty too: http://docs.openstack.org/liberty/install-guide-ubuntu/. Openstack is a full stack private cloud so it already comes with an authentication system by the way.

• Apache Cloudstack

The second technology worth checking is CloudStack, from the Apache foundation: https://cloudstack.apache.org/ I have not use cloudstack myself but I know it's frequently used and the install may be a little easier than Openstack.

As for Openstack, 3 machines are enough to have a fully functional private cloud, one controller, one network node and one (or more) compute nodes.

You may also want to check automation tools (such as Ansible, Puppet or Chef) to automatize your install of your cloud, since there are many steps, it can get messy, automation becomes very useful at this moment.

Hope it helps, and good luck ;-)

Answer 2

I have published semi-automatted, unattended installers for OpenStack in my github site:

https://github.com/tigerlinux

Also, in my github pages I have some I.T. recipes that you can find usefull for learning to do things in the cloud:

http://tigerlinux.github.io

The installers are updated to be used with lasttest openstack versions (including Mitaka), for Centos 7, Ubuntu 14.04lts and Ubuntu 16.04lts.

Feel free to use them and ask questions if you need further help.