This book assumes a moderate level of Linux system administration and cloud computing concepts' experience. Though this book will walk you through some snippets of real-life production environment running OpenStack, some rudimentary knowledge of the OpenStack components may be required. In addition to this, a basic knowledge and understanding of networking jargon and connectional design is required. If you possess some Ruby programming skills, this is a plus. The book does not specify any specific test environment. Feel free to use any lab environment that you feel more comfortable with, such as Oracle's VirtualBox, Vagrant, or the VMware workstation.

This book requires you to install and run OpenStack on physical hardware to support bare metal provisioning and, for this, a physical network infrastructure should be in place.

In this book, the following essential software is required:

Internet connectivity will be required to install the OpenStack packages and several other packages. Make sure that you use the most convenient hardware to perform tests of the snippets described in each chapter of this book.