Book excerpt: Design, deploy, and maintain your own private or public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), using the open source OpenStack platform. In this practical guide, experienced developers and OpenStack contributors show you how to build clouds based on reference architectures, as well as how to perform daily administration tasks. Designed for horizontal scalability, OpenStack lets you build a cloud by integrating several technologies. This approach provides flexibility, but knowing which options to use can be bewildering. Once you complete this book, you’ll know the right questions to ask while you organize compute, storage, and networking resources. If you already know how to manage multiple Ubuntu machines and maintain MySQL, you’re ready to: Set up automated deployment and configuration Design a single-node cloud controller Use metrics to improve scalability Explore compute nodes, network design, and storage Install OpenStack packages Use an example architecture to help simplify decision-making Build a working environment to explore an IaaS cloud Manage users, projects, and quotas Tackle maintenance, debugging, and network troubleshooting Monitor, log, backup, and restore