Cloud infrastructure is a unified pool of computing power, networking services, and storage systems, available to users on demand and managed centrally. Instead of purchasing and configuring physical servers and networks in advance, users get virtual machines, networks, and storage that can be created, modified, and deleted at any moment. This approach provides flexibility, quick adaptation to changing workloads, and simpler resource management, since all components are under unified control and configured through standardized APIs. Unlike deploying individual virtual machines and manually trying to group them into clusters, a cloud platform makes it easier to distribute workloads with built-in load balancers, ensures reliable data storage and backups, and enables the use of autoscaling and monitoring. This minimizes routine tasks of coordination and synchronization between nodes, speeds up the deployment of new environments, and reduces the risk of errors during manual configuration.
In our case, the cloud infrastructure is built on OpenStack — an open platform for creating private and public clouds. OpenStack combines a number of services responsible for virtualization, networking, storage, and security, and offers two main ways of managing resources: a web dashboard and a command-line utility called OpenStackClient.
The web dashboard is an intuitive interface that provides an overview of the cloud’s current state, as well as management of virtual machines and networks, configuration of storage, load balancers, and security rules.
OpenStackClient is used to work from the terminal. It makes the “openstack” command available in the system, allowing you to perform all operations — creating and managing virtual machines, networks, storage volumes, and other components — directly from the command line (CLI). OpenStackClient is especially convenient for automation: commands can be included in scripts, run in CI/CD pipelines, and scheduled. This makes it possible to apply the “infrastructure as code” approach, ensuring repeatable and reliable deployments.
In addition to the web dashboard and CLI, OpenStack offers built-in orchestration tools — for example, the Heat service, which allows you to describe the cloud architecture in templates — as well as integration with external tools such as Terraform and Ansible. Storing configurations as text files under version control speeds up delivery of changes, lowers the risk of manual errors during deployment and scaling, and simplifies environment maintenance.
The cloud infrastructure employs security measures that include blocking certain network ports and IP addresses. This prevents unauthorized access, reduces the risk of attacks, and ensures stable service operation. A list of blocked ports and address ranges is available in the “Blocked ports and IPs” section.