At the OpenStack last design conference, Greg Althaus and I presented about updates (presentation here) we were making to a Nov 2010 cloud architecture white paper.

The revised “Bootstrapping Open Source Clouds” white paper has been out for a few months so I thought it was past time to throw out a link.

I’m really pleased about this update because it reflects real world experience my team has working with customers and partners on OpenStack (and Hadoop) deployments.

Executive Summary
Bringing a cloud infrastructure online can be a daunting bootstrapping challenge. Before
hanging out a shingle as a private or public cloud service provider, you must select a platform,
acquire hardware, configure your network, set up operations services, and integrate it to work
well together. That is a lot of moving parts before you have even installed a sellable application.
This white paper walks you through the decision process to get started with an open source
cloud infrastructure based on OpenStack™ and Dell™ PowerEdge™ C servers. At the end, you’ll
be ready to design your own trial system that will serve as the foundation of your hyperscale
cloud.
2011 Revision Notes
In the year since the the original publication of this white paper, we worked with many
customers building OpenStack clouds. These clouds range in size from small six-node lab
systems to larger production deployments. Based on these experiences, we updated this white
paper to reflect lessons learned.