OpenStack is designed to be used at scale. Many IT projects might comprise a few physical assets deployed within an existing network, storage, and compute landscape, but OpenStack deployments are, by definition, new network, storage, and compute landscapes. Any project of this size and scope requires significant coordination between different teams within an IT organization. This kind of coordination requires careful planning and, in our experience, a lot of documentation.

This book is written to provide best practices for a relatively new role within many organizations—the Cloud Architect. The Cloud Architect's primary function is to take business requirements for Infrastructure or Platform as a Service and design an Infrastructure or Platform as a Service solution, which meets those requirements. This requires an in-depth knowledge of the capabilities of the infrastructure software paired with competency in network and storage architecture.

The typical Cloud Architect will have a background in compute and will lean heavily on the Network and Storage Architects within an organization to round out their technical knowledge. Since OpenStack is based on the Linux operating system, most OpenStack Architects will have a deep knowledge of that platform. But as we mentioned earlier, OpenStack is typically delivered as an API, and OpenStack Architects will need to have fluency in application development as well.

OpenStack Architects are responsible first and foremost for authoring and maintaining a set of design and deployment documentation. It's difficult to describe an ocean if you've never seen one, so this book will walk you through implementation of the documentation that you will create as you create it.