Learn how to install and configure all the core components of OpenStack to run an environment that can be managed and operated just like AWS or Rackspace. Master the complete private cloud stack from scaling out compute resources to managing swift services for highly redundant, highly available storage. Practical, real world examples of each service are built upon in each chapter allowing you to progress with the confidence that they will work in your own environments
There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Kevin Jackson's childhood ambition was to be a vampire but instead he became the last living polymath. His colossal expertise ranged from Seneca to Sugababes, with a special interest in the occult, Ruskin, take-away food, Dante's Inferno and the moose. He was the author of numerous books on numerous subjects, including Fast: Feasting on the Streets of London (Portobello 2006), and reviewed regularly for the Sunday Times. From: http://portobellobooks.com/3014/Kevin...
Kevin Jackson was an English writer, broadcaster and filmmaker.
He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After teaching in the English Department of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, he joined the BBC, first as a producer in radio and then as a director of short documentaries for television. In 1987 he was recruited to the Arts pages of The Independent. He was a freelance writer from the early 1990s and was a regular contributor to BBC radio discussion programmes.
Jackson often collaborated on projects in various media: with, among others, the film-maker Kevin Macdonald, with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson, with the musician and composer Colin Minchin (with whom he wrote lyrics for the rock opera Bite); and with the songwriter Peter Blegvad.
Jackson appears, under his own name, as a semi-fictional character in Iain Sinclair's account of a pedestrian journey around the M25, London Orbital.
OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook is one of these modern marvels when a person can acquire a book for mere $30 (or so) and build a career with it! Thanks Packt! And I assume one would get a very good living. These skills are very much in demand. So a big thank you to Kevin Jackson putting so much insight and effort into creating such a fantastic book. Indeed, the Cloud made quite a lot of buzz lately, and keeps doing so. With the prices per feature falling rapidly it is no longer a brainer Cloud's adoption is accelerating very fast. Luckily, it is very much possible to build an enterprise grade or even your own cloud (even on your own laptop!). The OSS community and many for-profit companies work day and night to make the Cloud more resilient, affordable and flexible. OpenStack is probably the most bolding one out of these. But it requires a good training as the aspects of creating and maintaining one may seem intimidating at the beginning. It is thus very advisable to get yourself equipped with a good companion as the OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook.
So, first things first, the book most probably is not targeting newcomers to the Cloud field or recent grads, but I may be wrong. Be aware though that the book is quite dry and spends a lot of time settings various bleeding edge technical things up (on Ubuntu and some Windows OS). I state the reader should be familiar with some basic bash commands as awk and sed, networking concepts, database, virtualization and storage to rip full befits of the material covered. Another note is regarding the hardware, you would only be able to fully cover everything discussed in the book if you had a decent machine with plenty of storage and RAM. I did not see anywhere exact specs mentioned, but I imagine a MacBook Pro or a Ubuntu machine with 16 Gb or RAM and 500Gb of SSD/HDD free should do just fine.
Those who have enough programming and/or administration skills under one's belt will be greatly rewarded from reading this book. At the same time this book is a good guide on how to maintain properly just any environment up. E.g. monitoring events, react to issues, troubleshoot, remedy storage mishaps, monitor queues and databases. Plus more. Everyone benefits.
While reading this book, somewhere towards the chapter 12 Monitoring, right after "In the Datacenter" I started to realize thanks to this book, I now have a better understanding what is going on behind the scenes when I click on provision new cluster or allocate a new VM in the cloud as an end user. Total coolness!
After finishing reading this book I am under an impression it must be bought both, in print and electronic forms. One should lay down on your desk because the last two chapters about the monitoring and troubleshooting would be the one you want to skim through first upon getting an issue to tackle. And the ebook should be on your mobile device (in case you get a trouble call or want to reply to an IRC message and need some reference), plus it allows easy copy-pasting into terminal or just in case you want a quick Ctrl-F (search) in your PDF reader for some information.
Verdict, this is a hard to beat book in both quantity, quality and coverage, so a 5 out of 5 is warranted!
http://goo.gl/nbj4UC - Pact Publishing I found this book to be well paced, I enjoyed setting up the Virtual Machines and taking hands on approach. I've been running a linux server for decades and I was afraid of the "Cloud". I decided to give this book a go and see if I could get something out of it, and I got more than I expected. Don't let the term cookbook confuse you here, it's a all out get your hands on the keyboard and let's get to work type of book. The chapters didn't seem to be too complex or packed tight, I felt they flowed nicely. I don't mind if authors pull from the main documentation to iterate over some important information and I was pretty pleased with this book. I took away the could storage setup as I'm always looking for ways to increase storage on an easily expandable deployment and i found the solution in the "cloud".
While this technology changes rapidly the core concepts remain the same and if anything this book didn't slack on anything. I'm not a novice by any means and as a beginner with OpenStack I found it to be a tremendous help and something that puts me on the edge of newer technology, grab a copy and get hands on!
A very useful book, a step-by-step guide for Openstack configuration to always keep on your desk. The second edition includes vagrant, a easy tool for creating and configuring virtual development environments. The book is full of examples and exercises. Many scripts can be easily reused and custumized, though you must be careful about few commands that have been changed recently. The authors give support in troubleshouting. It could be nice if the next edition will contain more about the philosophy and the history of OpenStack and its community.
Great book on OpenStack with good practice exercises. Perhaps unfairly I gave it three stars only because OpenStack is changing so quickly that in 6 months the book might be obsolete. Make sure you are using the version of Ubuntu on all your servers and host Ubuntu machine that Kevin is using in the book. Version 12.04, otherwise all bets are off on some of the examples.
I haven't finished reading this book yet, just read a few chapters. But my impression about this book is a bit disappointed. Actually, the topic of this book is very interesting. This book is all about building your own private cloud using a tool called OpenStack. If you have basic knowledge about Linux and VirtualBox, especially its command line, you won't get troubled. Most content of this book are Linux shell command. Even there is GUI version of the command, this book only show the command line version.
Another minus point of this book is it doesn't cover much about basic knowledge of what OpenStack really is. I think the writer assume that the reader already knew about OpenStack. So if you want to know more about what Cloud Computing is, or what OpenStack do, this book isn't for you. But if you don't car about the basic, just want to implement or build your own private cloud, then read this book.
The first chapter of this book told me about how to install OpenStack inside a VirtualBox, which I didn't understand, why they must install virtual machines inside a virtual machine. I couldn't find explanation of that method. And the next chapters mostly talked about features of OpenStack. Since I haven't finished reading this book, I can't tell you more about the other chapters. But from the first chapter, you would get your first impression of this book.
The author has approached the topic very intelligently, top-down first and then delving into every aspect of cloud computing in detail. Each topic is treated with utmost thoroughness in terms of possibilities, limitations, advantages and benefits and above all what one must anticipate. I am amazed at the knowledge of the author. I started reading the book end to end, then jumped to the topics I was interested in. Great book for anyone trying to get an understanding of how to architect a cloud. This is a really deep book. Here you can find a very detailed description of the Cloud's solution design topics that you have to consider when you are designing a web application for the cloud.
OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook is a good bootstraping to OpenStack Environment with a pretty much rich technical steps towards establishing your OpenStack environment. Another good point is that last two chapters "OpenStack in Datacenter" And "Monitoring" which give me an overview about OpenStack in real production environment and consequence considerations. However this book lacks theory / philosophy behind OpenStack and appropriate talk about OpenStack design to get the full OpenStack overview.
This is a very good cookbook but probably shouldn’t be your first text on OpenStack.
Just following the examples, you’ll be able to stand up an environment but may remain mystified by what you just did. Mr Jackson does give CLI examples with detailed explanations of their relative components but the larger context is missing. That or it’s assumed you know your way around.
When I came back to the text after understanding the components better, I got a lot more out of it.
A great practical book on OpenStack cloud computing. The step by step recipe approach makes complex operations a lot easier to digest. However there are typos and quite few errors throughout, but nothing that should really put the reader off.