"OpenStack Octavia in Practice"
"OpenStack Octavia in Practice" is an authoritative guide for cloud architects, operators, and DevOps professionals seeking to master modern load balancing within the OpenStack ecosystem. Organized to provide both a foundational understanding and advanced, hands-on insights, the book traces the evolution from traditional Neutron LBaaS to the robust and flexible Octavia platform. Readers are introduced to Octavia's core concepts and architectural underpinnings, exploring its integration with OpenStack's networking, identity, and security services. Detailed comparisons with alternative solutions and real-world use cases set the stage for understanding why Octavia is the load balancer of choice for scalable, hybrid, and cloud-native environments.
A significant portion of the book is devoted to practical deployment, operationalization, and hardening of Octavia. Concrete guidance is given on planning multi-region and highly available deployments, automating infrastructure with Ansible and Terraform, and integrating observability through metrics, logging, and alerting frameworks. Readers learn to tackle day-to-day lifecycle management—including upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery—while mastering security and compliance requirements, such as GDPR or PCI-DSS. Best practices for network security, certificate management, and tenant isolation are clearly outlined, ensuring robust and compliant load balancing architectures.
The book rounds out with advanced topics and forward-looking strategies, from extensibility and integration with Kubernetes and service meshes, to case studies in enterprise, telco, and edge computing environments. Readers are shown how to scale Octavia across regions, benchmark performance, and contribute to the project's upstream community. Through real-world operational analysis and a comprehensive best practices checklist, "OpenStack Octavia in Practice" empowers technologists to confidently design, deploy, and manage high-performance, resilient load balancing in today's dynamic cloud landscapes.