Components of OpenStack

 Components of OpenStack

There are currently three main components of OpenStack: Compute, Object Storage, and Image Service. Let's look at each in turn.

OpenStack Compute is a cloud fabric controller, used to start up virtual instances for either a user or a group. It's also used to configure networking for each instance or project that contains multiple instances for a particular project.

OpenStack Object Storage is a system to store objects in a massively scalable large capacity system with built-in redundancy and failover. Object Storage has a variety of applications, such as backing up or archiving data, serving graphics or videos (streaming data to a user’s browser), storing secondary or tertiary static data, developing new applications with data storage integration, storing data when predicting storage capacity is difficult, and creating the elasticity and flexibility of cloud-based storage for your web applications.

OpenStack Image Service is a lookup and retrieval system for virtual machine images. It can be configured in three ways: using OpenStack Object Store to store images; using Amazon's Simple Storage Solution (S3) storage directly; or using S3 storage with Object Store as the intermediate for S3 access.

The following diagram shows the basic relationships between the projects, how they relate to each other, and how they can fulfill the goals of open source cloud computing.