Congratulations! By now, you should have a solid design for your cloud. We now recommend that you turn to the OpenStack Installation Guide (http://opsgui.de/1eLCvD8 for Ubuntu, for example), which contains a step-by-step guide on how to manually install the OpenStack packages and dependencies on your cloud.

While it is important for an operator to be familiar with the steps involved in deploying OpenStack, we also strongly encourage you to evaluate configuration-management tools, such as Puppet or Chef, which can help automate this deployment process.

In the remainder of this guide, we assume that you have successfully deployed an OpenStack cloud and are able to perform basic operations such as adding images, booting instances, and attaching volumes.

As your focus turns to stable operations, we recommend that you do skim the remainder of this book to get a sense of the content. Some of this content is useful to read in advance so that you can put best practices into effect to simplify your life in the long run. Other content is more useful as a reference that you might turn to when an unexpected event occurs (such as a power failure), or to troubleshoot a particular problem.