Warning: article aimed at medium-sized companies or micro, very, very particular small companies such as very advanced and particularly innovative start-ups.
In the previous article you read about hypervisors, which allow you to create to administer virtual computers, or machines, then IT infrastructure. Here let’s look at how to indirectly have one for your company, which is unlikely given the premise: I happened to be dealing with a branding agency, then a type of marketing, that had created virtual computers for a client. More specifically, this article is aimed at companies, also interested in data science, that need to have more than 20 virtual machines. Otherwise, much less complex hypervisors , such as Hyper V, the subject of a later article, will suffice.
The solution, OpenStack, comes from NASA, and unfortunately it is a case where the name carries with it a certain complexity, but here I will choose a more accessible solution variant.
Some companies may need to develop a private cloud, in this case intended as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It has lower costs excluding those in skills, but above all more predictable, compared to a so-called public cloud like that of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle. Infrastructure as a service can mean creating various virtual machines for the customer.
Yes but what does that have to do with statistics?
Suppose you want to create a virtual machine or computer just for a specific microservice, statistical or otherwise. Using microstack, the easiest version of OpenStack to install, via “snap” on an Ubuntu system, you can choose the denomination of this computational instance via the “flavor,” which allows you to select computational resources such as vCPU and RAM. For those familiar with a certain Amazon service, the flavor names will look familiar.
It is convenient to install certain statistical services, for example Airbyte, on dedicated virtual machines (instances using the OpenStack lexicon) and not on other machines with already other services, because in case of problems, even force majeure, disruptions increase.
This type of solution, OpenStack, is not by chance used as an option by a well-known supplier in Italy: Aruba. And it is not by chance that VPS are created thanks to this technology.
If you want, OpenStack can be managed with a tool known to developers, which in my opinion has a name that is appropriate for the creation of digital infrastructures: terraform.
Warning: when implementing this solution, you also need to take care of security on the power side, via UPS, and on the instance side: you need “two pumps” in case one has a problem.
Some would argue that the cloud cannot be put together with the word hypervisor.
Want to explore whether this type of solution is right for you? Let’s discuss it in a free initial call.