Architecture of a cloud hosting service using python technologies: django, ansible and celery

The talk will show the architecture and inners of a cloud hosting service we are developing in the University of Cambridge based on python technologies, mainly django, ansible, and celery.

The users manage their hosts using a web panel, developed in django, with common options: ability to create a vhost, associate domain names to vhosts, install packages, recover from backups, make snapshots, etc. Interaction between the panel and the hosts are made using ansible playbooks launched asynchronously by celery tasks. The VM architecture has been designed to be VM platform agnostic and to provide disk replication and high availability.

The University of Cambridge central IT services (http://www.ucs.cam.ac.uk/) also provides other services to the rest of the university like domain name registration, authentication, authorisation, TLS certificates, etc. We link all these other services with the hosting service by using APIs while keeping a microservices architecture approach. Thus, enabling the use/link of other services within the same hosting service web application.