OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed and provisioned through APIs with common authentication mechanisms.
OpenStack is broken up into services to allow you to plug and play components depending on your needs. The OpenStack map gives you an āat a glanceā view of the OpenStack landscape to see where those services fit and how they can work together.
Itās important to note that OpenStack technologies are independent of the hypervisor. Support is implemented through the appropriate drivers in Nova project.
Keystone, OpenStackās identification service, is a centralized catalog of users and services they can access. Keystone perms as united authentication system of the cloud operating system.
Glance, OpenStackās image service, runs the catalog of virtual machinesā images, which users can use as templates to run instances of virtual machines in the cloud.
Cinder, OpenStackās block storage service, can be used by running instances of virtual machines. This is permanent data storage for virtual machines. Snapshots can be used for data saving and restoring or cloning. In most cases, data storage based on GNU/Linux servers is used together with Cinder.
Swift, OpenStackās object storage service. This service allows users to store files.
Ceilometer, OpenStackās telemetry service, is a centralized information source based on cloud metrics for monitoring data.
Heat, OpenStackās orchestration service, has the main task of application life cycle provision in cloud infrastructure.
Horizon, OpenStackās dashboard service, allows management of cloud resources through the web console.
Test Environment
MicroStack allows you to create an OpenStack test lab. It is a Canonical project based on the snap tool.
Deployment
Kolla-Ansible deploys a containerized OpenStack control plane using Kolla containers, orchestrated via Ansible. The project aims for simplicity and reliability, while providing a flexible, intuitive configuration model.