Due to its open nature and rapidly growing user base, OpenStack has become a hotbed and testing ground for disruptive innovations in cloud-computing virtualization, networking, and storage technologies. Rather than modify core OpenStack components directly, these technologies are introduced by extending or enhancing component functionality via the creation of new services and API extensions.
In this talk we will present a real-world case study of one such extension, which allows the "streamed" launching of VMs from a snapshotted "golden image", thus skipping the boot process and providing more rapid transition from the "off" state to the "ready to perform work" state. We will detail the key architectural questions that must be answered in the creation of such an extension, the development challenges that we encountered, and we will walk through the architecture and design of our extension itself. Additionally, we will address some of the business challenges that arise from building commercial software atop an open source project.
