OpenStack++ Explanation

OpenStack++ is an extension that adds "cloudlet" support to OpenStack, which is a popular open-source cloud platform. Think of a cloudlet as a mini data center placed between your phone or mobile device and the main cloud — it's designed to reduce latency and improve performance for mobile apps by keeping computation closer to the user. This project brings that cloudlet concept into OpenStack so organizations can set up and manage these intermediate computing layers.

The system works by letting you take a base virtual machine image (a pre-configured operating system), store it on a cloudlet, and then quickly spawn customized versions of it by applying lightweight "overlays" — essentially the differences between your custom setup and the base image. Instead of launching full copies of a VM each time, you only transfer the small differences, which is much faster. You can also move running VMs between different OpenStack instances if needed, a process called "VM handoff."

To use it, you'd install OpenStack++ on Ubuntu 14.04 using Ansible (a tool that automates software setup), then import a base VM image through a dashboard panel. From there, you can resume that base image, customize it by installing your own software, save those customizations as an overlay, and later quickly spin up new instances using that overlay. The README mentions this approach can dramatically speed up VM startup times compared to traditional cloud computing.

This would appeal to organizations running mobile apps or services that need low latency, researchers exploring edge computing architectures, or anyone operating their own private cloud who wants to test cloudlet concepts. The project hasn't been actively maintained in a few years — it was last tested on OpenStack Kilo (released around 2015) — so it's more of a reference implementation or research tool than a production system being actively developed.