OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private clouds. It is backed by some of the biggest companies in software development and hosting, as well as thousands of individual community members. OpenStack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit that oversees both development and community-building around the project.

OpenStack lets users deploy virtual machines and other instances that handle different tasks for managing a cloud environment on the fly. It makes horizontal scaling easy.

OpenStack is open-source software, which means that anyone who chooses to can access the source code, make any changes or modifications they need, and freely share these changes back to the community at large.

OpenStack is made up of many different moving parts. Because of its open nature, anyone can add additional components to OpenStack to help it to meet their needs.

The OpenStack community has collaboratively identified nine key components that are a part of the core of OpenStack, which are distributed as part of any OpenStack system:

• • Nova is the primary computing engine behind OpenStack. It is used for deploying and managing large numbers of virtual machines and other instances to handle computing tasks.
  • Swift is a storage system for objects and files. It is open-source software designed to manage the storage of large amounts of data cost-effectively on a long-term basis across clusters of standard server hardware. The OpenStack Swift project team works on storage capabilities, drivers and bug fixes designed to improve the performance, stability, reliability, scalability and usability of the object storage software.
  • Cinder is a block storage component, which is more analogous to the traditional notion of a computer being able to access specific locations on a disk drive. This more traditional way of accessing files might be important in scenarios in which data access speed is the most important consideration.
  • Neutron provides the networking capability for OpenStack. It helps to ensure that each of the components of an OpenStack deployment can communicate with one another quickly and efficiently.

• Horizon is the dashboard behind OpenStack. It is the only graphical interface of OpenStack. The dashboard provides system administrators a look at what is going on in the cloud and to manage it as needed.

• Keystone provides identity services for OpenStack. It is essentially a central list of all of the users of the OpenStack cloud, mapped against all of the services provided by the cloud, which they have permission to use. Developers can easily map their existing user access methods against Keystone.
• Glance provides image services to OpenStack. In this case, “images” refers to images (or virtual copies) of hard disks. Glance allows these images to be used as templates when deploying new virtual machine instances.
• Ceilometer provides telemetry services, which allow the cloud to provide billing services to individual users of the cloud. It efficiently collects, normalizes and transforms data produced by OpenStack services. Its primary targets are monitoring and metering, but the framework is expandable to collect usage for other needs.
• Heat is the orchestration component of OpenStack, which allows developers to store the requirements of a cloud application in a file that defines what resources are necessary for that application. In this way, it helps to manage the infrastructure needed for a cloud service to run.

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. Beyond standard infrastructure as a service functionality, additional components provide orchestration, fault management and service management amongst other services.