Canonical has launched MicroCloud 3.1, the cloud infrastructure management toolkit (the first release of the 3.x branch) that enables rapid deployment of cloud systems and computing clusters with a shared distributed data storage and secure virtual network on your hardware. MicroCloud is packaged as a snap, including the components needed to manage the operation of cluster nodes. The toolkit is written in Go and is distributed under the AGPL 3.0 license.
MicroClouds can create clusters ranging from 3 to 50 nodes with high availability. The software stack for cluster management is based on the LXD toolkit, the OVN (Open Virtual Network) platform for building virtual networks, and the distributed fault-tolerant storage system Ceph. The setup of LXD, Ceph, and OVN across all cluster nodes is automated. The primary platform considered is the Ubuntu Server distribution, but the toolkit is not tied to Ubuntu and can be used with any distributions that support the installation of snap packages (such as Arch Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE, RHEL, etc.). 
To detect new servers nodes on the network that can be connected to the cluster, mDNS is used, allowing the entire cluster to be configured by simply running the command "microcloud init" on one of the nodes and the command "sudo microcloud join" on the remaining nodes after installing the snap packages lxd, microceph, microcloud, and microovn. After executing the command "microcloud init", the toolkit will identify other servers in the local network, prompt to add disks to the Ceph shared storage, and offer to configure virtual network settings. To add additional nodes after initialization, the command "microcloud add" can be used. The cluster configuration can be saved in YAML format for the subsequent deployment of similar systems.
The general file storage is created with replication and fault tolerance enabled, allowing data not to be lost in case of failure of individual nodes by storing multiple data instances on different nodes. To deploy storage based on Ceph in the cluster, in addition to local disks, at least three separate disks dedicated to distributed data storage must be present on three different computers.
Once the cluster is ready, users are granted the ability to run their applications using containers or virtual machines, as well as access to the shared Ceph storage and the centralized management tools based on LXD. Flexible management of the provided CPU, memory, and I/O resources, USB device passthrough, GPU, and drives is possible. Isolated and virtual environments can be migrated between nodes in live migration mode and saved using snapshots. Metrics on cluster performance and logs of events can be exported for monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana.
In the new version:
- Support for using Cluster Manager for centralized monitoring and management of multiple MicroCloud clusters within a single application has been added.
- After the interactive installation of the cluster via the 'microcloud init' command, a prompt is provided to generate a temporary access link to the management web interface, allowing immediate access to the LXD web interface where nodes, networks, storage pools, images, permission groups, etc., can be created and configured. Temporary access lasts for 24 hours (it is assumed that this time will suffice for setting up permanent access).
- Experimental support for MicroOVN 26.03 (Micro Open Virtual Network) has been added, a set of background processes for Open vSwitch that translates virtual network configuration into OpenFlow. Unlike Open vSwitch, MicroOVN provides a higher level of abstraction, working not with flows but with logical routers and switches.
Source: opennet.ru
