Foreword

Whole project started as a hobby project for fun. I always wanted to have small, cheap private cloud at home. I have built couple of OpenStack private cloud solutions so I decided to use the experience and prepare OpenStack distribution which is as easy to install and manage.

All services runs in Docker containers and basic deployment is done by simple bash script. There is no need to hassle with config files, because these are generated by DietStack containers during startup process. Simple deployment means that unlike other OpenStack distributions, DietStack supports exactly one configuration based only on free linux software. It means that it uses KVM (libvirt) as a hypervisor for Nova, NFS for Cinder, VXLANS and linux bridges for Neutron networking.

To avoid dependencies as much as possible, it doesn’t use packages from any linux distribution to deploy OpenStack service. Instead docker containers are built directly from upstream OpenStack repositories. This makes DietStack independent from major linux distros. DietStack doesn’t use any configuration management for deployment. Is is just few bash scripts.

HA configuration is not supported as it increases complexity significantly. Availability of small installations can be solved by other ways.

OpenStack services in DietStack

  • Keystone (Identity Management)
  • Glance (Images)
  • Nova (Compute)
  • Neutron (Networking)
  • Cinder (Block Storage)
  • Heat (Orchestration)

OpenStack version

Version 1 of DietStack was based on Newton version of OpenStack. Current version is version 2, and is based on Pike.

How DietStack can be used

Diestack is suitable for OpenStack training and learning purposes as well as for small private cloud installations. At home I’m using it for all my VMs like Git server, NAS Server, Torrent Downloader and more. I’m using it also for development purposes and due to the fact OpenStack has built-in multitenancy, I can have production and development VMs separated on a network level.

Scalability

DietStack is built to run OpenStack on cluster up to 10 nodes - 1 control node and 9 compute nodes. It should be enough for most SOHO purposes. Nevertheless technically there is no built-in limit in DietStack itself, so you can try to deploy it on more nodes if you want.

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