My Take - O'Reilly OpenStack Operations Guide

I recently finished the O’Reilly OpenStack Operations Guide and I thought I would provide some feedback for those who are in the market for a general OpenStack operations handbook.

I have been in IT so long I remember installing Windows 95 with floppy disks (don’t laugh so do some of you) so books such as the OpenStack Operations Guide are easy for me to digest. The writing did not suffer from the dry prose some of these handbooks tend offer up while being informative and filled with examples. I also have exposure to the OpenStack environment in general so the concepts presented in the text were not new to me. That said this is a technical text and you should expect a similar layout as other guides you have read in the past.

The book is broken down into the categories of architecture and operations. The architecture topics range from provisioning the OpenStack services to preparing a network design. There are excellent descriptions of the OpenStack services and easy to digest definitions throughout. The operations topics include suggestions that one could adopt as part of their operational posture as well as examples of best practices. Additionally a blend of command-line examples and bulleted lists help guide the user through the process.

I found the book to be insightful and written for an audience of technologists with general OpenStack knowledge or even those with minimal OpenStack exposure. I believe an administrator or technologist who is just beginning to dive into the details of OpenStack would find the text relevant and useful in an operational context. The text I reviewed was an early ebook release, here is the O’Reilly link to both the early release and the final edited version that will be released in April.