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OpenStack Masakari

OpenStack Masakari is an OpenStack project that provides automated high availability (infrastructure resilience) for instances running on failed or isolated compute nodes in a cloud environment.

  • Automated instance recovery on failed compute nodes (infrastructure resilience)
  • Monitoring and detection of compute host failures (infrastructure monitoring)
  • Integration with OpenStack Nova for instance failover workflows (cloud infrastructure)
  • Support for host evacuation and instance restart policies (workload continuity)
  • APIs and services for managing instance HA behavior in OpenStack clouds (cloud operations)

More About OpenStack Masakari

OpenStack Masakari is an OpenStack service focused on providing high availability (infrastructure resilience) for Virtual Machine (VM) instances by automating recovery when compute hosts experience failures. It addresses failure handling within OpenStack-based private and public clouds where tenants run workloads that require controlled restart or migration behavior during host outages.

Masakari works in conjunction with OpenStack Nova (cloud infrastructure) to detect and respond to compute host failures. When a monitored compute node becomes unreachable or enters an error state, Masakari orchestrates instance recovery workflows, such as restarting instances on alternative hosts or evacuating them according to configured policies. This function fits into enterprise continuity planning (business continuity) for workloads deployed on OpenStack, without requiring guest-level clustering software.

The project exposes APIs and services (cloud operations) that allow operators to configure and manage instance high-availability behavior. Masakari maintains information about segments or groups of hosts and applies recovery rules at that scope, which helps operators align failover strategies with hardware domains, availability zones, or other topology groupings. It integrates with existing OpenStack identity, messaging, and compute services so that recovery actions follow the same authorization and scheduling logic used for normal instance operations.

In enterprise and institutional environments, Masakari is used to reduce manual intervention during hardware or hypervisor failures and to standardize the behavior of instance failover across large-scale OpenStack deployments (infrastructure automation). Operators can define the conditions under which instances are restarted or evacuated and can coordinate these with maintenance procedures, such as planned host shutdowns or rolling upgrades. This approach supports predictable recovery processes for applications that are not natively clustered but still require availability targets.

From an architectural perspective, Masakari interacts primarily with Nova compute services and relies on the broader OpenStack control plane (cloud platform) for scheduling and state management. It is commonly positioned alongside other OpenStack operational services, such as monitoring and alarming tools, but focuses directly on instance recovery actions rather than metrics collection or alerting. For taxonomy and cataloging purposes, OpenStack Masakari fits into the categories of high availability management, infrastructure resilience, and OpenStack operations tooling within cloud infrastructure stacks.