Developing an OpenStack Environment: An Exploration of Experimentation and the Diagnostic Research

OpenStack technology allows the building of a cloud services like Infrastructure, Platforms & Applications as a Service (IaaS, PaaS & SaaS) for various customers. The experimentation presents a mapping of general cloud architecture with OpenStack running on a single node for Saas development, unfolding how OpenStack works, its dashboard, creating an OpenStack working environment, and how web server, application server and database server is deployed on OpenStack. For experimentation purpose openstack is used to create a cloud environment and deploy software applications that could be accessed within a given private and public network. It is also illustrated how it is beneficial to run any website or web application on OpenStack. OpenStack is compared with one of the top competitor namely Amazon Web Services (AWS propriety source code environment) and it is found that OpenStack is a cost-effective, elastic, flexible, open-source and can be used for testing and research purposes.