Understand Azure Cobalt 100 and OpenStack

Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based processor

Azure’s Cobalt 100 is Microsoft’s first-generation, in-house Arm-based processor. Built on Arm Neoverse N2, Cobalt 100 is a 64-bit CPU that delivers strong performance and energy efficiency for cloud-native, scale-out Linux workloads. These workloads include web and application servers, data analytics, open-source databases, and caching systems. Running at 3.4 GHz, Cobalt 100 allocates a dedicated physical core for each vCPU, which ensures consistent and predictable performance.

To learn more, see the Microsoft blog Announcing the preview of new Azure VMs based on the Azure Cobalt 100 processor .

OpenStack

OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing platform used to build and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments. It allows users to provision and manage compute, storage, and networking resources using APIs and dashboards, similar to those of public cloud providers.

OpenStack is widely used for private cloud deployments, hybrid cloud environments, edge and telecom infrastructure, and development and testing platforms.

OpenStack runs efficiently on Arm-based architectures such as Azure Cobalt 100, enabling cost-effective and scalable cloud environments.

Key services in OpenStack

OpenStack is composed of the following modular services that handle different aspects of cloud infrastructure:

• Keystone (Identity): Manages authentication and authorization
• Nova (Compute): Manages virtual machine (VM) lifecycle
• Glance (Image): Stores and manages VM images
• Neutron (Networking): Provides networking and connectivity
• Cinder (Block Storage): Provides persistent block storage for instances
• Horizon (Dashboard): Provides a web-based user interface for managing resources

OpenStack architecture components

A typical OpenStack deployment consists of the following:

• Controller Node: Runs core services such as API, scheduler, and database
• Compute Node: Hosts virtual machines using hypervisors
• Networking (Neutron): Handles virtual networking, bridges, and routing
• Storage Services: Provide block and object storage

Two deployment approaches: DevStack and Kolla-Ansible

In this Learning Path, you’ll learn two ways to deploy OpenStack on an Azure Cobalt 100 Arm64 VM. Each approach has different requirements and suits a different use case.

DevStack is a script-based installer designed for development and testing. It runs all OpenStack services directly on the host OS and is the fastest way to get a working OpenStack environment. It isn’t suitable for production.

Kolla-Ansible runs every OpenStack service as a Docker container and is the recommended approach for reproducible, production-grade deployments. It takes longer to set up but is easier to manage, upgrade, and extend.

Virtual machine requirements for each deployment

Because the two approaches have different infrastructure requirements, you’ll be creating two separate Azure VMs in this Learning Path.

What you’ve learned and what’s next

In this section, you learned about Azure Cobalt 100 and OpenStack. You were introduced to two approaches for deploying OpenStack on Cobalt 100, and the infrastructure requirements for each approach.

In the next section, you’ll create the VM for the DevStack approach for deploying OpenStack on Cobalt 100.