Hi,

You are near to be right, OpenStack will provide you the infrastructure for your applications, like instances, databases, networks, etc. But OpenStack will provide you some others methods for application delivery as orchestration.

The applications can be the same as you were using since you met OpenStack, but this is not the idea of cloud computing. Cloud applications must be designed to scale out, not scale up and the workload should be separated between various instances running the same job.

Here you got some info about considerations when design cloud applications: http://www.opendatacenteralliance.org/docs/DevCloudCapApp.pdf

http://blog.harbinger-systems.com/2012/02/design-considerations-while-migrating-the-application-to-cloud/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2630514/paas/application-design-guidelines-for-cloud-computing.html

Best regards

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the great question.

Eduardo has a good answer, but I just wanted to add: you might be interested in thumbing through the "Writing your First App for OpenStack" tutorial. There's a bit of information in there about the kind of different things you could do with the APIs and cloud apps in general. Here's the one for libcloud, which is a python SDK:

http://developer.openstack.org/firsta...