OpenStack Summit May 2014 Atlanta

OpenStack is quickly gaining momentum as a general-purpose IaaS platform to host a variety of applications. However, for some applications, running on shared or general-purpose virtualized hardware may be suboptimal or even unacceptable for a number of reasons, including performance or security. Workloads that can benefit from dedicated, physical systems include extremely I/O intensive and/or CPU intensive applications (analytics, 3D modeling, media transcoding, HPC, etc) or applications designed to leverage specialized hardware such as GPUs. Moreover, many applications have 'hybrid' nature, comprising different components with different infrastructure requirements, that can be best met with different kinds of hardware -- virtualized or bare-metal.
In this talk we will survey the main challenges in hosting 'bare-metal' and 'hybrid' applications in the cloud in general, and using OpenStack in particular, will outline possible design approaches, and will demonstrate how OpenStack can be enhanced to optimally host such applications.