The previous article introduced OpenStack from a non-technical perspective. Today, we begin with a technical perspective to introduce OpenStack. First, this article will provide a general overview of the components that make up OpenStack, followed by several in-depth articles on each individual component.
OpenStack Core Features
OpenStack is composed of numerous services, each provided by a specific component, and each component can further be divided into different microservices.
Some services are officially designated by OpenStack as core functionalities, as shown in the diagram above. We list here the names of the core components, the services they provide, and the corresponding AWS services with similar functionality:
- Nova: Compute Service (Compute Service) AWS EC2
- Neutron: Networking / AWS VPC
- Keystone: Identity Service / AWS IAM
- Cinder: Block Storage / AWS EBS
- Glance: Image Service / AWS AMI
- Ironic: Baremetal Provisioning Service / AWS EC2 Baremetal
- Horizon: Dashboard / AWS Dashboard
- Heat: Orchestration / AWS CloudFormation
- Swift: Object Storage / AWS S3
The official core functionalities listed above
Many OpenStack deployments include these services, but Swift is less commonly seen.
These different components will be combined into a powerful private cloud service that can deliver most of the features offered by public cloud providers within your own environment.
Other Common Services
In addition, some non-core functionalities commonly found in OpenStack deployments are also worth noting, such as:
- Designate: DNS Service / AWS Route 53
- Octavia: Load Balancer Service / AWS ELB
- Manila: Shared File System / AWS EFS
If there is a need to use these services, their specialized nature has also been thoroughly tested.
Summary
This article lists several common OpenStack projects; in the next article, we will provide a more in-depth introduction to each project, starting with Nova—the most central and longest-developed service.
Copyright Notice: All articles in this blog are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 unless otherwise stated.