While the core OpenStack components provide good tools to manage the infrastructure, handling more complex scenarios, like for example the set of machines required by Data Processing toolkits (Hadoop) requires a bit of manual intervention.
Sahara, a recently-integrated component of the OpenStack project, can manage such kind of resources by leveraging the existing OpenStack components (Nova for instances, Glance for images, Swift for data storaga, Heat for orchestration, etc). Initially targeted to support Hadoop distributions, thank to its modular plugin-based architecture Sahara gained support for other processing model, like Spark and Storm.
The goal of the presentation is to introduce the concepts behind Sahara, its integration with the rest of OpenStack ecosystem and a brief demo of its functionalities.
Main website:
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/sahara/