OpenStack Infrastructure Optimization Service

CERN operates an OpenStack based private cloud to provide its users with resources on demand. It is one of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world, with more than 300,000 cores over 9,000 hypervisors.  

Managing such a large deployment is a very challenging work, and as the need for computing resources grows, the infrastructure is planned to grow accordingly.

One of the main challenges is to optimize and maximize the resource utilization. A lot of effort, such as the
work on preemptible virtual machines, is being done at CERN to improve that.  

This report presents another work done in that scope, which is the integration of a framework for infrastructure optimization for OpenStack, called Watcher.  

The report starts by giving an overview of Watcher, describing its architecture and explaining how it works.
Then, focus is put on the integration of Watcher for CERN’s cloud. Finally, a conclusion summarizes the key points of this project, and what future work could be done to further integrate Watcher at CERN.