Performance Evaluation of OpenStack Deployment Tools

Abstract: Cloud computing enables on-demand access to a shared pool of computing resources, that can beeasily provisioned, configured and released with minimal management cost and effort. OpenStack isan open source cloud management platform aimed at providing private or public IaaS cloud onstandard hardware. Since, deploying OpenStack manually is tedious and time-consuming, there are several tools that automate the deployment of OpenStack. Usually, cloud admins choose a tool basedon its level of automation, ease of use or interoperability with existing tools used by them. However,another desired factor while choosing a deployment tool is its deployment speed. Cloud admins cannot select based on this factor since, there is no previous work on the comparison of deploymenttools based on deployment time. This thesis aims to address this issue. The main aim of the thesis is to evaluate the performance of OpenStack deployment tools with respectto operating system provisioning and OpenStack deployment time, on physical servers. Furthermore,the effect of varying number of nodes, OpenStack architecture deployed and resources (cores andRAM) provided to deployment node on provisioning and deployment times, is also analyzed. Also,the tools classified based on stages of deployment and method of deploying OpenStack services. In this thesis we evaluate the performance of MAAS, Foreman, Mirantis Fuel and Canonical Autopilot. The performance of the tools is measured via experimental research method. Operating system provisioning time and OpenStack deployment times are measured while varying the number of nodes/OpenStack architecture and resources provided to deployment node i.e. cores and RAM. Results show that provisioning time of MAAS is less than Mirantis Fuel, which is less than Foreman.Furthermore, for all 3 tools as number of nodes increases provisioning time increases. However, the amount of increase is lowest for MAAS than Mirantis Fuel and Foreman. Similarly, results for baremetal OpenStack deployment time show that, Canonical Autopilot outperforms Mirantis Fuel by asignificant difference for all OpenStack scenarios considered. Furthermore, as number of nodes in an OpenStack scenario increases, the deployment time for both the tools increases. From the research, it is concluded that MAAS and Canonical Autopilot perform better as provisioningand bare metal OpenStack deployment tool respectively, than other tools that have been analyzed.Furthermore, from the analysis it can be concluded that increase in number of nodes/ OpenStackarchitecture, leads to an increase in both provisioning time and OpenStack deployment time for all the tools.