HA OpenStack Control Plane on Google Cloud Platform
René Bon Ćirić
High-Availability OpenStack Control Plane on Google Cloud Platform
Role: Lead Cloud Infrastructure Consultant
Client/Context: Modelyo
Timeline: Under 3 weeks (Solo Engineering Sprint)
Core Technologies: OpenStack, Google Cloud Platform (GCP VPC), OpenTofu, CentOS Stream 10, Advanced Linux Routing
Challenge & Problem Statement
Modelyo required an enterprise-grade, High-Availability (HA) OpenStack control plane deployed directly inside Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to drive specialized private cloud workloads and dynamic orchestration.
However, nesting OpenStack within GCP introduces severe architectural impediments:
GCP's Software-Defined Networking (SDN) VPC does not natively support Layer-2 broadcast, ARP, or standard Virtual IP (VIP) failover protocols (e.g. Keepalived/VRRP) required by standard OpenStack HA control planes.
Previous internal estimates called for a multi-engineer team working 3 to 4 months to resolve the network impedance mismatch and deploy the stack.
Architectural Solution & Strategy
Systems Architecture
L2/L3 Network Impedance Resolution
Overcame GCP VPC constraints without costly third-party overlays by designing a resilient routing architecture using Linux dummy interfaces, advanced IP route policies (
ip rule/ip route), and GCP Internal HTTP(S) & TCP Load Balancers with multi-region health checks.Declarative IaC with OpenTofu
Re-architected deployment from legacy Terraform to modular OpenTofu, enforcing strict parameterization, state locking, and reproducible provisioning across test and production environments.
CentOS Stream 10 Baseline
Standardized control plane nodes on CentOS Stream 10, implementing hardened systemd unit supervision and immutable configuration files.
Implementation Highlights
Engineered automated health-check probes coordinating with GCP regional backends to achieve sub-second failover between OpenStack API services.
Containerized OpenStack control plane services with rootless isolation, optimizing CPU/memory footprint across GCP compute instances.
Completed full architectural delivery as a solo engineer in under 21 calendar days.
Verifiable Results & Business Impact
Financial Efficiency: Generated $80,000+ in engineering resource savings by eliminating the need for an external consulting agency team.
Rapid Time-to-Market: Control plane fully operational and validated in under 3 weeks.
High Availability: Passed simulated multi-zone outage tests with automated failover and zero control plane data corruption.
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Posted Sep 19, 2026
Solved GCP VPC SDN Layer-2 impedance mismatch to deploy an HA OpenStack control plane in under 3 weeks, saving $80k in team fees.
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Timeline
Nov 1, 2025 - Dec 31, 2025
Clients
Modelyo
