Take IT ops to the next level – even for bare metal – with this open-source-based stack

[ServicesExperts]

To help businesses ease IT operations and management, HPE offers open-source-based software-defined infrastructure. It delivers strong composability and robust day-2 operation manageability – even for bare metal as a service.

By Yeon Ki Choi, Chief Solution Architect, Cloud Native Computing Practice Area, HPE Advisory & Professional Services

It is a common norm that 80% of the total cost of ownership of an enterprise IT platform is from operation and maintenance, not from consulting, design, and build parts. All vendors in the IT market are working on software, frameworks, and toolkits to ease IT operations and management by providing a complete end-to-end stack with the relevant functionalities as proprietary software suites, since many enterprises have concerns and needs in this area. Hewlett Packard Enterprise also addresses these concerns and needs for its customers; however, HPE offers additional choices by providing not only proprietary software suites, but also software-defined infrastructure that leverages the open-source ecosystem. These open-source-based software-defined infrastructure solutions can provide significant reduction of initial capital expenditure along with optimized operational costs.

In this blog, I’ll focus on IT service delivery and resource supply through a control plane leveraging open-source software defined infrastructure with the use cases of bare-metal/virtual/storage as a service to explain how it works.

Open-source-based software-defined infrastructure (SDI) refers to an open-source-software-based technical stack with abstraction, resource pooling, and automation to deliver infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This is the composability feature that software-defined infrastructure provides over any IT resource components such as physical servers, enterprise storage, and network to make an abstracted resource pool and to allocate resources to workloads with flexibility. It is the South-bound layer of a stack from a control plane. The North-bound is the service catalog presented from the control plane to service consumers. 

Open-source-software-based infrastructure and its ecosystem

There are several stacks with open source software, but here is one which, from our experience, can be leveraged in the case of bare-metal services to be offered to service consumers. A bare-metal-as-a-service offering is always a challenge for many stacks – even for open-source-software-based stacks – since bare-metal devices cannot be managed easily.

• Control plane: OpenStack
• Compute: Bare-metal, Virtual
• Storage: Block, Object, File (Ceph)
• API: MaaS API and OpenStack API
• Workflow: Gitlab/Ansible/Terraform

OpenStack covers the end-to-end stack for virtual compute, container compute, and storage (block and objective), as described in my colleague Kyaw Thiha’s blog Build your private cloud with OpenStack and HPE. However, it does not entirely cover bare-metal compute lifecycle management, which requires heavy operational efforts. It takes additional functionalities, alongside OpenStack, to make open-source-software-based infrastructure a reality.

The key components that play this role are bare-metal control functionality and automated workflow to communicate through the control API. The popular bare-metal control functionality is Metal as a Service (MaaS) from Canonical OpenStack, which provides complete physical server lifecycle management operations along with other compute and storage resources. Additionally, leveraged image building from MaaS Image Builder automates the process of creating and maintaining the image pipeline. It defines and configures end-to-end building of new images for bare-metal provisioning.

The automated workflow powered by Ansible, centrally stored in GitLab CI/CD and integrated with OpenStack and MaaS, provides the connectivity from the control plane – both North- and South-bound. It also reduces the operations and management effort for bare-metal compute. 

A sample workflow is as follows:

Bare-metal provisioning workflow leveraging CI/CD pipeline with MaaS

This integrated stack, leveraging a variety of open-source-software-based infrastructure  (OpenStack with MaaS) and tools from the open-source ecosystem (Gitlab/Ansible/Terraform), is able to cover not only virtual resources and container based applications, but also bare-metal resources, which makes the complete resource set available to users.

Fast route to next-gen IT ops

Open-source-based software-defined infrastructure is able to take enterprise IT platforms to the next generation, covering a wide variety of resources such as bare-metal compute, virtual compute, container compute, and storage.

HPE GreenLake Advisory & Professional Services has strong expertise and experience backed by thousands of code contributions and hundreds of OpenStack project deliveries around the globe. We can guide your enterprise on its open-source-software-based cloud transformation journey with a proven methodology and vast experience/expertise.

Learn more about advisory and professional services from HPE Pointnext Services.

Yeon Ki Choi is a Chief Solution Architect, Cloud Native Computing Practice Area, with HPE Advisory & Professional Services. Yeon Ki has 19 years of experience in enterprise IT technology and business initiatives through various mission-critical enterprise IT delivery projects. He is responsible for the development, pursuit and delivery of public and private cloud solutions offerings. Yeon Ki is currently based in Singapore.

Services Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_Pointnext
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-pointnext-services/
hpe.com/pointnext