Cloud Blueprint
Kubernetes and OpenStack under one operating model. Not two teams, two toolchains, and two sets of problems. Genestack deploys a production-grade private cloud using Helm, Kustomize, and Kubernetes operators — from bare metal to running VMs and containers side by side.
Full documentation at docs.rackspacecloud.com
What you get
- OpenStack services deployed and managed on Kubernetes via Helm and Kustomize. One ops model for everything.
- Bare-metal provisioning with Ironic — PXE, IPMI, and automated re-provisioning. No manual racking.
- Leaf-spine network architecture with Kube-OVN and OVS/OVN. Two-hop east-west traffic, not spaghetti.
- Commodity storage: Ceph, Swift, Longhorn, iSCSI, RBD, NFS, and LVM. Use what you have.
- Kubernetes operators manage backing services (MariaDB, RabbitMQ, Memcached) with automatic failover.
- Production and test deployment modes from the same codebase. No drift between environments.
Core Capabilities
VM lifecycle on Kubernetes-managed infrastructure
Nova manages the full lifecycle of virtual machines — creation, scheduling, live migration, and termination. Backed by KVM/QEMU through libvirt, it runs on bare-metal nodes provisioned via Ironic. Placement tracks resource allocation across the cloud to ensure optimal scheduling. Horizontal scaling groups auto-scale API services based on demand.
Software-defined networking with OVS/OVN
Neutron provides virtual networks, routers, security groups, and load balancers (Octavia). Kube-OVN serves as the CNI plugin, bridging Kubernetes and OpenStack networking through OVS/OVN switches. Gateway API handles ingress and egress. The leaf-spine network architecture minimizes latency with two-hop east-west traffic paths.
Block, object, and distributed storage
Cinder provides block storage volumes for VMs. Longhorn handles distributed block storage for Kubernetes workloads with PVC replication. Ceph and Swift provide scalable object storage on commodity hardware. CSI plugins integrate storage drivers directly into Kubernetes. Multiple backends supported: iSCSI, RBD, NFS, and LVM.
Metrics, logs, alerts, and visualization
Prometheus collects metrics from node and API exporters across the infrastructure. Alertmanager handles alert aggregation, grouping, deduplication, and notification routing. Fluentbit collects and processes logs from Kubernetes pods and OpenStack services, forwarding to Loki for aggregation and LogQL querying. Grafana ties it all together with dashboards, Loki datasources, and alert configuration. Datadog integration available as an alternative.
OpenStack Services
Infrastructure Services
Architecture
Bare Metal Layer
Ironic provisions physical servers via PXE/IPMI. Leaf-spine networking connects compute, storage, and control planes.
Kubernetes Control Plane
etcd-backed API server runs operators for MariaDB, RabbitMQ, Memcached, and all OpenStack services.
OpenStack Integration
OpenStack APIs connect to backing databases (read-many cluster), quorum queues, and storage drivers via Kubernetes operators.
Networking
Kube-OVN CNI bridges K8s and OpenStack networking. Neutron manages VLANs, VXLANs, and advanced routing through OVS/OVN.
Storage
Longhorn for K8s PVCs, Ceph/Swift for object storage, Cinder for VM block volumes. CSI plugins for all backends.
Observability
Prometheus metrics, Fluentbit + Loki logging, Alertmanager notifications, Grafana dashboards. Datadog optional.
Documentation
Deployment guides, architecture references, and operational runbooks are available at the Rackspace OpenStack documentation site.