OpenStack Summit May 2015 Vancouver

The conventional approach to deploying applications on OpenStack uses virtual machines (usually KVM) backed by block devices (usually Ceph RBD).  As interest increases in container-based application deployment models like Docker, it is worth looking at what alternatives exist for combining compute and storage (both shared and non-shared).  Mapping RBD block devices directly to host kernels trades isolation for performance and may be appropriate for many private clouds without significant changes to the infrastructure.  More importantly, moving away from a virtualization allows for non-block interfaces and a range of alternative models based on file or object.

Attendees will leave this talk with a basic understanding of the storage components and services available to both virtual machines and Linux containers, a view of a several ways they can be combined and the performance, reliability, and security trade-offs associated with those possibilities, and several proposals for how the relevant OpenStack projects (Nova, Cinder, Manila) can work together to make it easy.