What is OpenStack?

Overview

OpenStack is a global collaboration open-source community of developers and technologists producing an open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. It is a collection of subprojects with the aim of producing OpenSource cloud computing infrastructures.

The OS is simple to implement and massively scalable cloud OS. It is supported by the giant industry players and makes it desirable to be adopted by organizations. It is currently the most popular vendor-agnostic Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software stack designed to power the clouds.

This famous cloud OS consist of three core software projects which are OpenStack Compute (Nova), Object Storage (Swift) and Image service (glance). It mainly provides IaaS for private and public cloud infrastructures. Moreover, It is one of the top and feature-rich open-source cloud computing operating systems available for customization and adoption by organizations.

Major Components of OpenStack

This open source platform is a collection of  many projects integrated together to provide massively scalable comprehensive and dependable services to cloud consumers. And the cloud OS orchestrates and consists of many subprojects to deliver scalable infrastructure to cloud based datacenters.

Major components of OpenStack project include the following:

Nova

Nova is the primary computing engine behind OpenStack. Additionally, Nova helps us to  deploy and manage large numbers of virtual machines and other instances to handle computing tasks. In addition, it exposes REST APIs and plugins for integration with other platforms as well.

Swift

 Swift is a storage system for objects and files. Furthermore, Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store.  And it supports using dedicated network for replication of traffic.

Cinder

Cinder is a block storage component of OpenStack. In other words, Cinder has volume, snapshot and backup resources. Moreover, the volume is persistent Read/Write block storage and can be attached to VMs as secondary storage. And the snapshot is a read-only point in time copy of a volume. Whereas the backup is an archived copy of a volume.

Neutron

 Neutron provides the networking capability for OpenStack cloud platforms. Furthermore, it provides a flexible API (POST / GET) for service providers or their tenants to manage OpenStack network topologies. And Neutron helps to ensure that each of the components of an OpenStack deployment can communicate with one another quickly and efficiently.

Horizon

Horizon is the dashboard behind OpenStack. And Horizon is graphical interface and provides system administrators a look at what is going on in the cloud, and manage it.

Keystone

 This provides identity services for OpenStack users. Additionally, Keystone provides Identity, Token, Catalog and Policy services for use specifically by projects in the OpenStack family. Besides, it is essentially a central list of all of the users of the OpenStack cloud, mapped against all of the services provided by the cloud which they have permission to use.

Glance

Glance provides image services to the environment. Besides, Glance provides services for discovering, registering, and retrieving virtual machine images.

Heat

 Heat is the orchestration component of the cloud OS. Moreover, Heat allows developers to store the requirements of a cloud application in a file that defines what resources are necessary for that particular application.