OpenStack deployments are often compared to snowflakes. There are so many different ways to combine the various supported compute, storage, and network configurations that no deployment resembles any other deployment. The analogy is frequently used in frustration at companies which offer commercial support for OpenStack - the diversity of deployments makes supporting customers extremely difficult. Many of the clients we work with have also expressed frustration at the myriad of options. On the other hand, most of the people who have been running OpenStack for a while realize the value in having so many options. It allows them to continually provide new services and capabilities to their customers under a common interface.

In this chapter, we walked through each of the three major areas of technology in OpenStack-compute, network, and storage. In each area, we've broadly described the choices available and provided some guidance on how to approach the decision process. We've also expanded our deployment documentation and the deployment itself to incorporate some of the information covered in this chapter. This basic deployment can be expanded and should provide enough diversity to be used to test out different compute, network, and storage technologies in the lab before making a purchasing decision.

In the next chapter, you'll look at how to take this simple deployment and make it more robust with the addition of high availability software.