Ampere is known for leading the industry with our Ampere^® Altra™ Arm64 processors optimized for cloud workloads. In many discussions with open source developers, we are often asked for typical use cases for our high-performance compute platforms. Obviously, virtualization and containerization immediately come to mind when we think about how to take advantage of all those Arm64 cores.

Recently, the OpenStack Foundation announced it has renamed the foundation to the Open Infrastructure Foundation, widening its focus to a variety of open-source cloud infrastructure technologies. It will provide an open environment for enabling new emerging use cases such as AI, edge computing, 5G and cloud-native application.

This is a first in a series of “how to” blogs that will look at OpenStack. This blog focuses on an OpenStack all-in-one deployment for servers with Arm64 processors.

OpenStack is a great workload to test and show the capabilities of Ampere servers because it provides a management API framework for providing different cloud related services/analogs to Amazon/Azure/GCE that can be deployed within one’s own datacenter. Once deployed, one can utilize DevOPs tooling with the provided OpenStack APIs to quickly deploy virtual machine resources at scale.

While researching the best and efficient way to get to a working OpenStack deployment for Arm64 based platforms, I went through different combinations and permutations of the different deployment tools for deploying OpenStack. The steps here are the easiest and fastest to achieve a working OpenStack Cloud which provides basic virtualization functionality. I used Kolla and Kolla-Ansible to deploy an OpenStack AIO on Arm64 systems as the community maintains these projects in an upstream continuous integration ensuring a functioning OpenStack deployment for Arm based architectures. OpenStack-Ansible isn’t recommended due to lack of complete multiplatform packaging and hard coded requirements for x86 systems.

To get started and test the OpenStack deployment on Ampere Altra processors, read the steps here https://github.com/AmpereComputing/OpenStack-on-ampere I will continue to write about OpenStack how-to tips in future blogs.