1www.openstack.org OpenStack Workload Reference Architecture: Web Applications
OpenStack Workload Reference
Architecture: Web Applications
Web applications are the most prevalent
applications in business today. They are driven
by user interaction over the Internet using a web
browser front-end. Common web applications
include webmail, online retail sales, online
auctions, online banking, instant messaging
services, and more.
Web applications are typically characterized by IT
resource requirements that uctuate with usage,
predictably or unpredictably. Failure to respond
to either can impact customer satisfaction and
sales. An automatically scaling web application
and underlying infrastructure can be essential.
Unlike a traditional, static environment,
cloud computing allows IT resources to scale
dynamically, both up and down, based on the
application-generated load (CPU utilization,
memory, etc.).
The OpenStack cloud platform oers auto-scaling
for web applications as well as a comprehensive
platform for all IT applications, oering agility
and cost-eectiveness. OpenStack is open
source cloud software that controls large pools
of compute, storage, and networking resources
throughout a datacenter, all managed through a
dashboard or API. Thousands of enterprises use
OpenStack to run their businesses every day.
Intended for enterprise IT architects, this
reference architecture describes the architecture
and services required by a simple three-tier
web application, using popular LAMP software
on an OpenStack cloud. LAMP consists of Linux,
Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl and is
considered by many as the platform of choice
for development and deployment of high
performance web applications.
We identify and recommend the required and
optional OpenStack services for both a static
virtualized implementation and a fully dynamic
auto-scaling implementation. Lastly, we will
provide tested implementation les you can
use to install and instantiate an OpenStack web
application environment using Wordpress as
the sample application. These les are Heat
templates that will create the virtual servers
for each tier, networking, load balancing, and
optionally, auto-scaling.
Figure 1: Three-tier web application architecture
overview
This reference architecture is for a general
workload developed by members of the
Enterprise Working Group and is not
representative of the contributors’ companies.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Craig Sterrett, Software Architect, Intel Corporation
Yih Leong Sun, PhD, Senior Software Cloud Architect, Intel Corporation
Shamail Tahir, Oering Manager, IBM
Data source
Database tier
Business logic tier
Presentation tier