openstack Conceptual Architecture

Conceptual Architecture

The OpenStack project as a whole is designed to "deliver(ing) a massively scalable cloud operating system." To achieve this, each of the constituent services are designed to work together to provide a complete Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This integration is facilitated through public application programming interfaces (APIs) that each service offers (and in turn can consume). While these APIs allow each of the services to use another service, it also allows an implementer to switch out any service as long as they maintain the API. These are (mostly) the same APIs that are available to end users of the cloud.

Conceptually, you can picture the relationships between the services as so:

• Dashboard (Horizon) provides a web front end to the other OpenStack services

• Compute (Nova) stores and retrieves virtual disks ("images") and associated metadata in Glance

• Image (Glance) can store the actual virtual disk files in Object (Swift)

• All the services (will eventually) authenticate with Identity (Keystone)

This is a stylized and simplified view of the architecture, assuming that the implementer is using all of the services together in the most common configuration. It also only shows the "operator" side of the cloud -- it does not picture how consumers of the cloud may actually use it. For example, many compute users will use object storage heavily (and directly).

---