Openstack comes with multiple tools to help you automate the creation and installation/configuration of your cloud resources. This is particulary useful when you want to be able to re-create your infrastructure, for instance if you create a virtual lab for multiple groups of students. There are two main types of automation documented in our wiki; automatic infrastructure creations and automatic server installation.

Automatic infrastructure creation

To automaticly create and manage your virtual infrastructure you can use:

• Openstack Heat

Automatic server installation

Openstack hava a several ways to automate cusomisation/configuration of virtual machines after they have beed created. The two most important ones are:

• Cloud-config - An automation-tool which lets you define what to install and configure in your VM at first boot.
• Post-installation scripts - Shell-scripts (ie: bash for Linux or cmd/powershell for windows).

Automatic creation of a set of customized virtual machines

The tools mentioned above, like cloud-config, can be used in simple-ish scripts to automate the creation of sets of virtual machines to classes etc. A couple of example-scripts for this is placed in one of our github repositories.