Beginners' guide to Cloud Computing and OpenStack

In the past decade cloud computing has been gaining popularity at a tremendous rate. Some cloud providers are experiencing a growth rate of 50% year over year – which is just astounding. And the reasons for this growth is obvious – cloud computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources which can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal effort. As companies across the globe enjoy the benefits of public cloud infrastructure – they also want to leverage the same principles of cloud computing and bring those benefits to how they manage their own private data centers or build private clouds on top of public cloud infrastructure. These private cloud deployments provide secure and highly efficient way to install, configure and manage pooled computing resources which could be shared among various departments or groups within the organization. The provisioning and consumption of these pooled resources become much smoother and consumers can use these resources on self-service basis eliminating lengthy provisioning wait times etc. OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for building and managing our own IaaS cloud infrastructure. This cloud software platform comprises of various services and components which can configure and manage control hardware pools of computing power, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users either manage it through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through a RESTful API.