The previous article introduced the OpenStack project from a non-technical perspective. Starting today, we will introduce OpenStack from a more technical standpoint. This post will provide a general overview of the components that make up OpenStack, followed by in-depth introductions to each component in subsequent articles.
OpenStack Core Functions
OpenStack is composed of numerous services, each provided by a specific component. These components can further be divided into different microservices.
Some of these services are designated as core functions by the official OpenStack documentation (indicated by the bolded projects in the diagram above). Here, we list the names of these core components, the services they provide, and their equivalent AWS services:
- Nova: Compute Service / AWS EC2
- Neutron: Networking Service / AWS VPC
- Keystone: Identity Service / AWS IAM
- Cinder: Block Storage Service / AWS EBS
- Glance: Image Service / AWS AMI
- Ironic: Bare Metal Provisioning Service / AWS EC2 Bare Metal
- Horizon: Dashboard / AWS Dashboard
- Heat: Orchestration Service / AWS CloudFormation
- Swift: Object Storage Service / AWS S3
The core functions listed officially above
In my experience, most OpenStack deployments include these services, though Swift is less common.
These various components combine to form a powerful private cloud service, capable of delivering most of the features offered by public clouds within your own environment.
Other Common Services
Additionally, based on my experience, some non-core functions are also quite common in OpenStack deployments, such as:
- Designate: DNS Service / AWS Route 53
- Octavia: Load Balancer Service / AWS ELB
- Manila: Shared File System Service / AWS EFS
If you need these services, the stability of these projects has also been well-tested.
Summary
This post has listed common OpenStack projects. Starting from the next article, we will provide more in-depth introductions for each project, beginning with Nova, the most core and longest-running service.
Copyright Notice: All articles on this blog are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 unless otherwise specified.
