Openstack

I was hosting websites and applications on bare metal (co located) before cloud computing was a thing.

I previosuly provisioned and managed an ESXi cluster and when the retirement date came for the metal to come out of the datacenter, it could have been sold or reused.

I chose the latter and now have an Openstack machine running on a Dell r620 with 96GB or RAM, eight cores and 8 x 2.5" SSD drives. There is a secondary r710 server to add another 6 cores, 36GB of RAM and another 6 x 3.5" drives but I’m no where close to pushing the limits on the first machine yet.

Running a single base OS (CentOS), Openstack is provisioned with its standard modules and can be accessed with the Terraform provider which makes it a breeze to spin up new projects and play with some shiny toys.