Mastering OpenStack Administration - Hands‑On Lab

Navigate Horizon and Skyline dashboards to monitor quotas, launch instances, and view real-time resources, using familiar analogies and unified APIs for efficient cloud administration.

Master the OpenStack CLI, authenticate with environment variables, and run read-only queries across core services from the terminal. Learn the CLI grammar, use interactive shell, and format outputs for automation.

Explore how to authenticate OpenStack CLI across clouds using inline flags, OpenRC files, clouds.yaml profiles, and application credentials, balancing speed, security, and scalability.

Navigate the OpenStack official documentation with a ten-step checklist covering release notes, installation, deployment, administrator, configuration, api, security, architecture, operations, image, and contributor guides.

Explore Keystone's identity hierarchy—from domains to projects, users, groups, and roles—and learn how tokens, authentication versus authorization, and role assignments control access in OpenStack using Horizon, Skyline, and CLI.

Learn how Keystone authenticates users with passwords or tokens, and authorizes actions via short-lived Fernet tokens, using scopes from project to domain to system to control access.

Create a test project named TestProject-h, add a user with the member role, and verify access with Horizon, Skyline, and the CLI, using Keystone for role assignments.

Explore how Nova orchestrates OpenStack compute: from image download with Glance and port creation with Neutron to scheduler-driven boot of a VM on KVM, via API-driven automation and cloud-init metadata.

Decode OpenStack flavors, learning how vCPU, RAM, and root disk drive instance scheduling, and create private sizes visible to selected projects with extra specs such as CPU pinning.

Launch a Cirros micro-server with the OpenStack CLI, configuring image, flavor, network, security group, and key pair; monitor Nova and master the instance lifecycle with stop, start, reboot, and delete.

Master OpenStack keypair management by generating and injecting a public key via cloud-init, enabling passwordless SSH login, rotating keys, and auditing access for secure, compliant deployments.

Master Nova health checks with the CLI by using server list, server show, and console logs to diagnose issues, monitor diagnostics, and script reliable wait-until-healthy loops for automation.

Understand how OpenStack compute quotas govern instances, cores, and RAM, trigger 403 forbidden when the quota is exceeded, and how admins use quota show, quota set, and quota-breaker.

Learn to create, attach, snapshot, and back up OpenStack Cinder volumes, apply QoS and volume types, and manage persistent storage across back-ends.

Create a fresh cinder volume, attach it to a live OpenStack VM, format as ext4 and mount at /data, then detach and reattach to prove persistence via the OpenStack CLI.

Explore how cinder volume types route requests to backends, create lab-fast and lab-standard labels, and manage access, QoS, encryption, and migration across backends.

Protect OpenStack data with instant snapshots and off-site backups for quick rollbacks and durable recovery. Align recovery point objectives with hourly snapshots and nightly off-site backups.

Explore OpenStack cinder quotas at the project level—volumes, snapshots, backups, and total gigabytes; use quota show --usage to monitor, adjust limits, and automate pruning to prevent outages.

learn to carve isolated project networks with Neutron, connect them to the internet via virtual routers and floating IPs, enable overlay isolation with VXLAN, and secure traffic with security groups.

Explore how OpenStack Neutron separates provider and project networks using VXLAN overlays, with administrators control over provider networks and tenants self-service for project networks.

Create and manage a Neutron project network and subnet, automate DHCP and DNS, assign IPs with an allocation pool, and practice naming and teardown for scalable, dual-stack OpenStack networks.

Configure an OpenStack router to link project networks, enabling inter-network traffic, NAT for outbound access, and inbound connectivity via floating IPs.

OpenStack security groups are stateful, per-port firewalls that filter ingress and egress with protocol, port ranges, and source or destination CIDR or group, enabling micro-segmentation.

Master OpenStack quotas to protect networks and workloads by managing defaults for subnets, routers, ports, security groups, and floating IPs. Read usage, handle HTTP 409/413 quota errors, and plan overrides.

Discover how Glance powers rapid VM boot by delivering OpenStack images, distinguish qcow2 images from installation ISOs, and verify image metadata and sha256 checksums for trusted provisioning.

Read image records quickly and accurately to ensure safety and policy compliance before deployment. Apply a four-bucket checklist—file details, access control, resource requirements, behavioural hints—plus verify min_disk and os_hash_value.

Locate the Ubuntu 24.04 cloud image from the vendor portal, ensure it includes virtio drivers and cloud-init for kvm, and verify integrity with sha256sum and optional GPG signature.

Import and manage the Ubuntu 24.04 image in glance, track status transitions to active, attach metadata, and apply a protected flag for a ready-to-boot nova template.

Launch a production-grade Ubuntu 24.04 instance from a protected glance image, verify SSH key access, network security, cloud-init configuration, and automated disk resizing for a ready-to-deploy lab environment.

Design a secure, multi-tier OpenStack network using Neutron objects, with two-tier to three-tier architectures, security groups, and routing, enforcing least privilege through isolated subnets and policy-driven traffic.

Achieve true network isolation in OpenStack by implementing deny-by-default security groups, a bastion host for management, and router-based segmentation to meet audit and compliance needs.

Explore how Neutron routers boost resilience and throughput with ha and DVR, implement floating IP strategies, and read metrics for VRRP, L3 agent, and DNAT flows.

Launch and manage dual-homed OpenStack instances with multiple Neutron ports, configure per-port security groups, verify routing, and apply governance to prevent accidental bridging.

Explore how Octavia, OpenStack's load balancer-as-a-service, provisions amphora VMs running HAProxy to distribute traffic, detect failures, and implement the five-step workflow with a single VIP.

Learn to snapshot a live Ubuntu 24.04 instance, capture a preinstalled nginx image in Glance, and deploy web servers in under a minute for immutable, production-ready deployments.

Apply per-instance customization during first boot using cloud-init in OpenStack, supplying yaml user-data to write files, run commands, and verify by cloud-init logs and status.

learn to build custom OpenStack images with diskimage-builder using elements, cloud-init, and VirtIO drivers; compress, register with Glance, and automate image creation.

Pre install Kubernetes components into an OpenStack image and boot a cluster with cloud-init, then snapshot the image and deploy a ready master and worker nodes via join.

Adopt the cattle-based production lifecycle for custom images, using versioned, metadata-driven updates and automated health checks to achieve zero-downtime deployments via blue/green or rebuild strategies behind Octavia.

Verify OpenStack control plane health by running service inventory commands, interpreting 'up', 'down', and 'disabled' states, and safely recovering a failed component in a lab.

Learn to inventory, isolate, and act on a project's resources in OpenStack, using a ready-made script and command-line interface checks for servers, volumes, networks, and routers to surface red flags.

Diagnose compute access issues by authentication, authorization, and network; fix with a server rebuild to inject the key and adjust security groups for SSH, or use rescue if needed.

Diagnose networking hop-by-hop to restore DHCP for fixed IP addresses, enable external gateway and floating IP, then resolve Cinder errors and attach and mount the volume for service.