Public cloud provider

Availability Zone Support for OpenStack Octavia

Extending OpenStack Octavia with Availability Zone support for a large distributed public cloud platform.

Company

French · 1001–10000+ employees

A large French public cloud provider with 1,001–10,000 employees. The company provides cloud services and operates across 14 regions worldwide.

The project focused on extending the OpenStack functionality used within the customer’s cloud platform.

Challenge

The customer needed to add Availability Zone support to OpenStack Octavia, the OpenStack component responsible for load balancing services.

Availability Zones make it possible to logically separate infrastructure resources and take their location into account when provisioning cloud services. For a large public cloud operating across multiple regions, this functionality had to be integrated directly into the existing OpenStack platform and work within its current architecture.

The task was not to deploy a separate product, but to extend the capabilities of an OpenStack component already used by the customer.

KEY CHALLENGE

Add Availability Zone support directly to the existing OpenStack Octavia implementation while preserving its integration with the customer’s cloud platform.

Project specifics

The main technical characteristic of the project was the development of new functionality directly for OpenStack Octavia rather than the configuration of an existing platform feature.

The functionality was related to Availability Zones, a mechanism used to take logical infrastructure separation into account when placing cloud resources. In this project, that capability was implemented for Octavia load balancing services.

The customer operates a public cloud across 14 regions worldwide, so the work was carried out in the context of a large distributed cloud platform. However, the available information does not confirm that the change was deployed across all 14 regions.

Solution

Cloudification developed Availability Zone support for OpenStack Octavia within the customer’s cloud platform.

The work directly affected Octavia functionality, meaning the OpenStack layer responsible for providing Load Balancing as a Service. The new capability made it possible to take Availability Zones into account when working with load balancing resources.

This type of development requires working not only with the user-facing service logic, but also with the existing architecture of the OpenStack component, its internal interactions, and its integration with the rest of the cloud platform.

The project’s technology stack included OpenStack, Kubernetes, Ubuntu, Terraform, Puppet, and Python. The work was therefore carried out within the context of the customer’s existing cloud infrastructure and automation and configuration management tooling.

Result

As a result, Availability Zone support was implemented in OpenStack Octavia for the customer’s cloud platform.

This extended the available Octavia functionality and made it possible to use Availability Zones when working with load balancing services within the existing OpenStack infrastructure.