Clouds are the current trend in technology. There are many advantages to the cloud, all which are simply a Google search away. Here we are going to assume that you have already decided to create your own home cloud using OpenStack as the core. Now OpenStack has many components to it, and if OpenStack had their way you would be deploying 13 nodes. Now being that this is home or even a lab proof of concept deployment and we do not have the budget (both in hardware and in electricity and air conditioning) to deploy that kind of environment, I will be deploying first to a single node, then expanding into a triple node OpenStack cluster with the help of RDO.
First we need to architect what the cloud will look like. My goal is avoid paying for software as much as possible and as little as possible for hardware.