AWS VS OpenStack?????

Let us compare the popularity of two top cloud-computing platforms:
1) the infamous Amazon Web Services, which companies typically leverage for the speed and convenience of Amazon's global, hosted, cloud-computing infrastructure, and
2) the increasingly versatile OpenStack, which allows organizations to roll their own cloud-computing services on standard hardware.

OpenStack has similarly grown in popularity since its launch in 2010, having had a nice jump in the Spring of 2013. Some of the more notable companies contributing to OpenStack include: AT&T, MD, Canonical, Cisco, Citrix, Comcast, Cray, Dell, Dreamhost, EMC, Ericsson, Fujitsu, GoDaddy, Google, HP, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Mirantis, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE Linux, VMware, and Yahoo!.
While OpenStack has a lot of diverse contributors, AWS is the fifth largest web hosting provider globally.
Worldwide Market Share by Number of Clients in 2015:

1. GoDaddy - 4.26%
2. BlueHost - 2.56%
3. Host Gator - 2.15%
4. OVH.com - 1.91%
5. Amazon Web Services - 1.81%
6. Rackspace - 1.59%
7. 1&1 - 1.54%
8. Hetzner - 1.29%
9. SoftLayer - 1.19%
10. DreamHost - 1.01%

source: http://hostadvice.com/marketshare/ (2015)

As an open-source cloud-computing protocol, OpenStack obviously can't compete on these terms with a multi-billion dollar cloud-computing and software-as-a-service company. There are a number selling points to consider, however:

• WalMart uses OpenStack to coordinate 100,000+ cores, this provided 100% uptime during Black Friday last year
• Developers gave over 300 talks at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo this October
• Debian, Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE Linux all support OpenStack and are active contributors
• OpenStack has enabled companies like Disney, Bloomberg, and Wells Fargo to manage their own clouds at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions like AWS
• OpenStack is the only solution that supports mixed hypervisor and bare metal server environments

I think these points lend themselves to the conclusion that adoption and further development in OpenStack are likely to keep pace.

Here is a subset of AWS services:

In the Compute realm we have...

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) scalable virtual private servers using Xen
• Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Hadoop-based big data analytics

In Networking we have...

• Amazon Route 53 scalable DNS
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) isolated EC2 instances with the ability to extend corporate networks VPN
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

In Content Delivery we have...

• Amazon CloudFront CDN

In Storage we have...

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Amazon Glacier low-cost, long-term storage for data archival
• Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) to accompany EC2

In the Database realm we have...

• Amazon DynamoDB low-latency NoSQL SSD-backed databases
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL support
• Amazon SimpleDB distributed database with EC2 and S3 interoperability, written in Erlang

In the Deployment realm we have...

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk for quick deployment and cloud app management
• AWS OpsWorks EC2 configuration services via Chef, which we discussed previously

In Management we have...

• Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) to authenticate into the various services
• AWS Directory Service for tying into an on-premises Microsoft Active Directory or for setting up a new stand-alone AWS directory
• Amazon CloudWatch for application and resource monitoring
• Amazon CloudHSM Hardware Security Module for data security and for meeting regulatory compliance requirements
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS) for creating and managing encryption keys

In the Application Services realm we have...

• Amazon DevPay (beta) for billing and account management
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder (ETS) for mobile video transcription from S3
• Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for sending bulk and transactional email
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) multi-protocol application "push" notifications
• Amazon Cognito secure application-user data management and synchronization tool

In Analytics we have...

• Amazon Machine Learning for building regression models from publicly-available datasets

Here are the main components of the modular OpenStack architecture:

Compute (Nova)

• An Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system
• Management and automatation of pools of computer resources
• Bare metal and high-performance computing (HPC) configurations
• KVM, VMware, and Xen hypervisor virtualization
• Hyper-V and LXC containerization
• Python-based with various external libraries: Eventlet for concurrent programming, Kombu for AMQP communication, SQLAlchemy for database access, etc.
• Designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware with no proprietary hardware or software requirements
• Interoperable with legacy systems

Image Service (Glance)

• OpenStack Image Service for discovery, registration, and delivery of services for disk and server images
• Template-building from stored images
• Storage and cataloging of unlimited backups
• REST interface for querying disk image information
• Streaming of images to servers
• VMware integration, with vMotion Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) and live migration of running virtual machines
• All OpenStack OS images built on virtual machines
• Maintenance of image metadata
• Creation, deletion, sharing, and duplification of images

Object Storage (Swift)

• Scalable redundant storage system
• Automatic replication of content from failed disks to other active nodes
• Suitable for inexpensive commodity hard drives and servers

Dashboard (Horizon)

• GUI for access, provision, and automation of cloud-based resources for administrators and users
• Third-party billing, monitoring, management tool integration
• Customizable (brandable) dashboard
• EC2 compatibility

Identity Service (Keystone)

• Unified authentication system across the cloud OS
• Integration with existing backend directory services such as LDAP
• Various authentication methods: username/password, token-based systems, and AWS-style logins
• Queryable, single registry of all deployed services, with programmatic determination of access for users and third-party tools

Networking (Neutron)

• Manual and automatic management of networks and IP addresses
• Distict networking models for different applications and user groups
• Flat networks (VLAN's) for separating servers and traffic.
• Static IP addresses, DHCP
• Floating IP addresses for dynamic rerouting to resources on the network
• Software-defined networking (SDN), OpenFlow, for multi-tenancy and scalability.
• Management of intrusion detection systems (IDS), load balancing, firewalls, VPN's, etc.

Block Storage (Cinder)

• Persistent block-level storage for databases and expandable file systems
• Block storage integration into OpenStack Compute and Dashboard for allocation of storage
• Various storage platforms supported: Ceph, CloudByte, Coraid, EMC (ScaleIO, VMAX and VNX), GlusterFS, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM Storage (Storwize family, SAN Volume Controller, XIV Storage System, and GPFS), Linux LIO, NetApp, Nexenta, Scality, SolidFire, HP (StoreVirtual and 3PAR StoreServ families) and Pure Storag
• Snapshot management for backing up data stored on block storage volumes
• Restoring of snapshots, use of snapshots as templates for new block storage volumes

Orchestration (Heat)

• Orchestratation of multiple composite cloud applications using templates
• OpenStack-native REST API
• CloudFormation-compatible Query API

Telemetry (Ceilometer)

• Billing system Single Point Of Contact
• Traceable, auditable delivery of counters for billing
• Counters extensible to new projects
• Independent data collection

Database (Trove)

• Database-as-a-service (DaaS) provisioning relational database engine
• DaaS non-relational database engine

Elastic Map Reduce (Sahara)

• Hadoop cluster provisioning
• Setting of parameters based on: Hadoop version, cluster topology, node hardware details, etc.
• Cluster deployment in minutes
• Scaling of already-provisioned clusters by adding and removing worker nodes on demand

Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic)

• Provisioning of bare metal machines (as opposed to virtual machines)
• Bare-metal hypervisor API
• Plugins for interacting with bare-metal hypervisors
• PXE and IPMI simultaneous provisioning, turning machines on and off as needed
• Extensible with vendor-specific plugins for additional functionality

Multiple Tenant Cloud Messaging (Zaqar)

• Multi-tenant cloud messaging service for Web developers
• Some components inspired by Amazon's SQS, with additional semantics for event broadcasting
• Fully RESTful API for sending messages between various components of their SaaS and mobile applications
• Surfacing of events to end users and guest agents that run in the "over-cloud" layer

Shared File System Service (Manila)

• Vendor-agnostic share management API
• Create, delete, give/deny access to a share
• Support for commercial storage appliances from: EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Oracle, Quobyte, and Hitachi Data Systems
• Support for Red Hat's GlusterFS filesystem

DNSaaS (Designate)

• DNS as a Service

Security API (Barbican)

• REST API for secure storage, provisioning and management of secrets
• Built for use in all environments, including large ephemeral clouds

AWS Compatibility

• Interoperability with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3
• Minimal effort to port AWS client applications to OpenStack

Multi tenancy: AWS vs OpenStack

The first conceptual difference between AWS and OpenStack is about multi-tenancy. OpenStack offers a multi-layer tenant mechanism with domain and projects. A domain is a collection of users, groups, and projects, in a way parallel to AWS’s account. LDAP groups are attached to domains. OpenStack’s Project is a container of virtual resources such as virtual machines, networks and volumes. Using projects, users can establish several isolated and independently controlled groups of resources that serve different objectives. In the Kilo release, Keystone introduced the hierarchical multi-tenancy concept, using sub-projects.
Accommodating more than one million customers, Amazon Web Services is a multi-tenant cloud by nature; however, at the account level, a single user receives a single tenant experience. Having said that, AWS offers Virtual Private Cloud, VPC, which is somewhat parallel to OpenStack’s project. Amazon’s VPC lets the user provision a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud where the user can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that s/he defines.  AWS’s VPC is limited to one router and one IP block; though not compulsory, this is a common practice for OpenStack projects. It is worth noting that all EC2’s virtual networking capabilities are only available using VPC.
On the other hand, unlike OpenStack, Amazon’s VPC offers extremely valuable tools that simplify the establishment of secured connectivity between VPCs and between VPC and on-premise resources. The classical use case for enterprises is running the web servers or the entire customer facing application on Amazon’s public cloud, while keeping the rest of the servers on-premise. Through its API, Amazon allows the user to establish a VPN connection and even control the customer’s and AWS’s gateways. This is extremely valuable for enterprises that chose the hybrid cloud path, especially given the fact that Amazon has integrated its VPN gateway with the market leading VPN CPEs (customer premise equipment). OpenStack’s Neutron project does offers VPN as a Service capabilities (VPNaaS); however, it is experimental and lacks the end-to-end integration that Amazon provides.

Networking: Neutron vs AWS VPC

From the network perspective, while OpenStack provides control over the L2 elements of the virtual network, AWS exposes only subnets. OpenStack Neutron’s API allows granular control of elements such as ports (the connection point for attaching a virtual server to a virtual network) and the ability to allocate VLAN IDs that correspond to VLANs present in the physical network. This is especially useful for provider networks, which are mapped to existing physical networks in the data center. Those differences are again attributed to the different concepts of AWS and OpenStack. In the private cloud, the user manages the physical networking by himself. Thus, it is crucial for virtual networking to be fully integrated with the physical data center networking. However, the public cloud is a managed service that takes all the hassle of physical network management away from the user, therefore  providing control on L2 is irrelevant to the user.
As for Layer 3 networking, conceptually, Amazon’s AWS and OpenStack’s Neutron provides comparable capabilities. Both cloud services allow creation of network subnets. OpenStack allows use of several subnets on the same virtual network, although it is not a common practice. AWS allows users to define Elastic IP addresses, which are public IP addresses reachable from the Internet. OpenStack offers a similar mechanism, the floating IP, which is part of the virtual router’s API.
Both clouds provide routing services; in AWS each VPC includes an implicit virtual router and the API allows the user to set the routing table (which contains a set of rules, called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic is directed). OpenStack’s Neutron API also allows management of the routing table;  however, it also allows management of the router entities themselves and does not limiting the number of routers per project. Moreover, a single router can be connected to more than one project.
From a network security perspective, AWS and OpenStack offer similar mechanisms. Security groups are used to inspect the traffic at the instance level. Networking ACLs and virtual firewalls are used by AWS and OpenStack respectively to inspect traffic going between subnets. There are minor nuances unique to each API; however, the general concept is very similar.

Here we compare some main components of AWS and OpenStack

Compute

 Why you need it?

To run an application you need a server with CPU, memory and storage, with or without pre-installed operating systems and applications.

	OpenStack	AWS
Definition Compute is virtual machines/servers	Instance	Instance/VM
Sizes How much memory and CPU and temporary (ephemeral) storage is assigned to the instances/VM.	Flavors: Variety of sizes: micro, small, medium, large etc.	Variety of sizes: micro, small, medium, large etc.
Operating systems offered What operating systems does the cloud offer to end-users	Whatever operating systems the cloud administrators host on the OpenStack cloud. (Red Hat certifies Microsoft Windows, RHEL and SUSE)	AMIs provided by the AWS marketplace.
Templates/images A base configuration of a virtual machine, from which other virtual machines can be created. Catalogs of virtual machine images can be created from which users can select a virtual machine.	Glance  OpenStack administrators upload images and create catalogs for users. Users can upload their own images.	(AMI) Amazon Machine Image AWS provides an online marketplace of pre-defined images. Users can upload their own images.

Networking

 Why you need it?

To network virtual servers to each other. You also need to control who can access the server. You want to protect/firewall the server especially if it is exposed to the Internet.

	OpenStack	AWS
Definition Networking provides connectivity for users to virtual machines. Connects virtual machines to one another and to external networks (the Internet).	Neutron	Networking
A private IP address internal only and non-routable to the Internet	Every virtual instance is automatically assigned a private IP address, typically using DHCP.	AWS allocates a private IP address for the instance using DHCP.
Public IP address	A floating IP is a public IP address, that you can dynamically add to a running virtual instance.	AWS public IP address is mapped to the primary private IP address.
Networking service	You can create networks and networking functions, eg. L3 forwarding, NAT, edge firewalls, and IPsec VPN.	Virtual routers or switches can be added if you use AWS VPC, a virtual public cloud.
Load Balance VM traffic	OpenStack LBaaS (Load Balancing as a Service) balances traffic from one network to application services.	ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) automatically distributes incoming application traffic across Amazon EC2 instances.
DNS. Manage the DNS entries for your virtual servers and web applications.	The OpenStack DNS project (Designate) is in “incubation” and is not part of core OpenStack (as of the April 2015 Kilo release).	Route 53 –  AWS’s DNS service.
SRIOV A method of device virtualization that provides higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization compared to traditional implementations.	Each SR-IOV port is associated with a virtual function (VF). SR-IOV ports may be provided by Hardware-based Virtual Ethernet Bridging or they may be extended to an upstream physical switch (IEEE 802.1br).	AWS support enhanced networking capabilities using SR-IOV, provides higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower inter-instance latencies, and very low network jitter.

Monitoring

Why you need it?

You get insight into usage patterns and utilization of the physical and virtual resources. You may want to account for individual usage and optionally bill users for their usage.

	OpenStack	AWS
Definition Monitoring provides metering and usage of the cloud.	Ceilometer	Cloudwatch
System-wide metering and usage. Option to bill users for their usage	To collect measurements of the utilization of the physical and virtual resources comprising deployed clouds. Persist data for subsequent retrieval and analysis, and trigger actions when defined criteria are met.	Monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications  on AWS. Collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms.

Security

Why you need it?

You need the  option of public key cryptography for SSH and password decryption. You want to firewall virtual machines to only allow certain traffic in (ingress) or out (egress).

	OpenStack	AWS
Definition Control access to your virtual machines.	Keypairs, security groups.	Keypairs, security groups.
Key pairs To login to your VM or instance, you must create a key pair. Linux: used to SSH. Windows: used to decrypt the Administrator password.	When you launch a virtual machine, you can inject a key pair, which provides SSH access to your instance.	To log in to your instance, specify the name of the key pair when you launch the instance, and provide the private key when you connect to the instance.
Assign and control access to VM instances. A security group is a named collection of network access rules that limit the traffic that access an instance. When you launch an instance, you can assign one or more security groups to it.	Supported	Supported

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Intro to OpenStack

What is OpenStack?

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

Introduction to OpenStack

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, which means that tasks that benefit from running concurrently can easily serve more or fewer users on the fly by just spinning up more instances. For example, a mobile application that needs to communicate with a remote server might be able to divide the work of communicating with each user across many different instances, all communicating with one another but scaling quickly and easily as the application gains more users.
And most importantly, 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 out to the community at large. It also means that OpenStack has the benefit of thousands of developers all over the world working in tandem to develop the strongest, most robust, and most secure product that they can.

How is OpenStack used in a cloud environment?

The cloud is all about providing computing for end users in a remote environment, where the actual software runs as a service on reliable and scalable servers rather than on each end-user's computer. Cloud computing can refer to a lot of different things, but typically the industry talks about running different items "as a service"—software, platforms, and infrastructure. OpenStack falls into the latter category and is considered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Providing infrastructure means that OpenStack makes it easy for users to quickly add new instance, upon which other cloud components can run. Typically, the infrastructure then runs a "platform" upon which a developer can create software applications that are delivered to the end users.

What are the components of OpenStack?

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. But the OpenStack community has collaboratively identified nine key components that are a part of the "core" of OpenStack, which are distributed as a part of any OpenStack system and officially maintained by the OpenStack community.

• 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. Rather than the traditional idea of a referring to files by their location on a disk drive, developers can instead refer to a unique identifier referring to the file or piece of information and let OpenStack decide where to store this information. This makes scaling easy, as developers don’t have the worry about the capacity on a single system behind the software. It also allows the system, rather than the developer, to worry about how best to make sure that data is backed up in case of the failure of a machine or network connection.
  
• 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 to OpenStack, so for users wanting to give OpenStack a try, this may be the first component they actually “see.” Developers can access all of the components of OpenStack individually through an application programming interface (API), but 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. It provides multiple means of access, meaning 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 also keeps a verifiable count of each user’s system usage of each of the various components of an OpenStack cloud. Think metering and usage reporting.
  
• 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.
  

Who is OpenStack for?

You may be an OpenStack user right now and not even know it. As more and more companies begin to adopt OpenStack as a part of their cloud toolkit, the universe of applications running on an OpenStack backend is ever-expanding.

OpenStack Architecture

OpenStack Modules

• Compute (Nova)
• Networking (Neutron)
• Block Storage (Cinder)
• Identity (Keystone)
• Image (Glance)
• Object Storage (Swift)
• Dashboard (Horizon)
• Orchestration (Heat)
• and many more

Detail of some modules are given bellow

Compute (Nova)

OpenStack Compute (Nova) is a cloud computing fabric controller, which is the main part of an IaaS system. It is designed to manage and automate pools of computer resources and can work with widely available virtualization technologies, as well as bare metal and high-performance computing (HPC) configurations. KVM, VMware, and Xen are available choices for hypervisor technology (virtual machine monitor), together with Hyper-V and Linux container technology such as LXC.

It is written in Python and uses many external libraries such as Eventlet (for concurrent programming), Kombu (for AMQP communication), and SQLAlchemy (for database access). Compute's architecture is designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware with no proprietary hardware or software requirements and provide the ability to integrate with legacy systems and third-party technologies.

Due to its widespread integration into enterprise-level infrastructures, monitoring OpenStack performance in general, and Nova performance in particular, at scale has become an increasingly important issue. Monitoring end-to-end performance requires tracking metrics from Nova, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Swift and other services, in addition to monitoring RabbitMQ which is used by OpenStack services for message passing.

Networking (Neutron)

OpenStack Networking (Neutron) is a system for managing networks and IP addresses. OpenStack Networking ensures the network is not a bottleneck or limiting factor in a cloud deployment,[citation needed] and gives users self-service ability, even over network configurations.

OpenStack Networking provides networking models for different applications or user groups. Standard models include flat networks or VLANs that separate servers and traffic. OpenStack Networking manages IP addresses, allowing for dedicated static IP addresses or DHCP. Floating IP addresses let traffic be dynamically rerouted to any resources in the IT infrastructure, so users can redirect traffic during maintenance or in case of a failure.

Users can create their own networks, control traffic, and connect servers and devices to one or more networks. Administrators can use software-defined networking (SDN) technologies like OpenFlow to support high levels of multi-tenancy and massive scale. OpenStack networking provides an extension framework that can deploy and manage additional network services—such as intrusion detection systems (IDS), load balancing, firewalls, and virtual private networks (VPN).

Block Storage (Cinder)

OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) provides persistent block-level storage devices for use with OpenStack compute instances. The block storage system manages the creation, attaching and detaching of the block devices to servers. Block storage volumes are fully integrated into OpenStack Compute and the Dashboard allowing for cloud users to manage their own storage needs. In addition to local Linux server storage, it can use storage platforms including Ceph, CloudByte, Coraid, EMC (ScaleIO, VMAX, VNX and XtremIO), GlusterFS, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM Storage (IBM DS8000, Storwize family, SAN Volume Controller, XIV Storage System, and GPFS), Linux LIO, NetApp, Nexenta, Nimble Storage, Scality, SolidFire, HP (StoreVirtual and 3PAR StoreServ families) and Pure Storage. Block storage is appropriate for performance sensitive scenarios such as database storage, expandable file systems, or providing a server with access to raw block level storage. Snapshot management provides powerful functionality for backing up data stored on block storage volumes. Snapshots can be restored or used to create a new block storage volume.

Identity (Keystone)

OpenStack Identity (Keystone) provides a central directory of users mapped to the OpenStack services they can access. It acts as a common authentication system across the cloud operating system and can integrate with existing backend directory services like LDAP. It supports multiple forms of authentication including standard username and password credentials, token-based systems and AWS-style (i.e. Amazon Web Services) logins. Additionally, the catalog provides a queryable list of all of the services deployed in an OpenStack cloud in a single registry. Users and third-party tools can programmatically determine which resources they can access.

Image (Glance)

OpenStack Image (Glance) provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for disk and server images. Stored images can be used as a template. It can also be used to store and catalog an unlimited number of backups. The Image Service can store disk and server images in a variety of back-ends, including Swift. The Image Service API provides a standard REST interface for querying information about disk images and lets clients stream the images to new servers.

Glance adds many enhancements to existing legacy infrastructures. For example, if integrated with VMware, Glance introduces advanced features to the vSphere family such as vMotion, high availability and dynamic resource scheduling (DRS). vMotion is the live migration of a running VM, from one physical server to another, without service interruption. Thus, it enables a dynamic and automated self-optimizing datacenter, allowing hardware maintenance for the underperforming servers without downtimes.

Other OpenStack modules that need to interact with Images, for example Heat, must communicate with the images metadata through Glance. Also, Nova can present information about the images, and configure a variation on an image to produce an instance. However, Glance is the only module that can add, delete, share, or duplicate images.

Object Storage (Swift)

OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) is a scalable redundant storage system. Objects and files are written to multiple disk drives spread throughout servers in the data center, with the OpenStack software responsible for ensuring data replication and integrity across the cluster. Storage clusters scale horizontally simply by adding new servers. Should a server or hard drive fail, OpenStack replicates its content from other active nodes to new locations in the cluster. Because OpenStack uses software logic to ensure data replication and distribution across different devices, inexpensive commodity hard drives and servers can be used.

In August 2009, Rackspace started the development of the precursor to OpenStack Object Storage, as a complete replacement for the Cloud Files product. The initial development team consisted of nine developers. SwiftStack, an object storage software company, is currently the leading developer for Swift with significant contributions from HP, Red Hat, NTT, NEC, IBM and more.

Dashboard (Horizon)

OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) provides administrators and users with a graphical interface to access, provision, and automate deployment of cloud-based resources. The design accommodates third party products and services, such as billing, monitoring, and additional management tools. The dashboard is also brand-able for service providers and other commercial vendors who want to make use of it. The dashboard is one of several ways users can interact with OpenStack resources. Developers can automate access or build tools to manage resources using the native OpenStack API or the EC2 compatibility API.

Orchestration (Heat)

Heat is a service to orchestrate multiple composite cloud applications using templates, through both an OpenStack-native REST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API.

Workflow (Mistral)

Mistral is a service that manages workflows. User typically writes a workflow using workflow language based on YAML and uploads the workflow definition to Mistral via its REST API. Then user can start this workflow manually via the same API or configure a trigger to start the workflow on some event.

Telemetry (Ceilometer)

OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer) provides a Single Point Of Contact for billing systems, providing all the counters they need to establish customer billing, across all current and future OpenStack components. The delivery of counters is traceable and auditable, the counters must be easily extensible to support new projects, and agents doing data collections should be independent of the overall system.

Database (Trove)

Trove is a database-as-a-service provisioning relational and non-relational database engine.

Elastic Map Reduce (Sahara)

Sahara is a component to easily and rapidly provision Hadoop clusters. Users will specify several parameters like the Hadoop version number, the cluster topology type, node flavor details (defining disk space, CPU and RAM settings), and others. After a user provides all of the parameters, Sahara deploys the cluster in a few minutes. Sahara also provides means to scale a preexisting Hadoop cluster by adding and removing worker nodes on demand.

Bare Metal (Ironic)

Ironic is an OpenStack project that provisions bare metal machines instead of virtual machines. It was initially forked from the Nova Baremetal driver and has evolved into a separate project. It is best thought of as a bare-metal hypervisor API and a set of plugins that interact with the bare-metal hypervisors. By default, it will use PXE and IPMI in concert to provision and turn on and off machines, but Ironic supports and can be extended with vendor-specific plugins to implement additional functionality.

Messaging (Zaqar)

Zaqar is a multi-tenant cloud messaging service for Web developers. The service features a fully RESTful API, which developers can use to send messages between various components of their SaaS and mobile applications by using a variety of communication patterns. Underlying this API is an efficient messaging engine designed with scalability and security in mind. Other OpenStack components can integrate with Zaqar to surface events to end users and to communicate with guest agents that run in the "over-cloud" layer.

Shared File System (Manila)

OpenStack Shared File System (Manila) provides an open API to manage shares in a vendor agnostic framework. Standard primitives include ability to create, delete, and give/deny access to a share and can be used standalone or in a variety of different network environments. Commercial storage appliances from EMC, NetApp, HP, IBM, Oracle, Quobyte, and Hitachi Data Systems are supported as well as filesystem technologies such as Red Hat GlusterFS.

DNS (Designate)

Designate is a multi-tenant REST API for managing DNS. This component provides DNS as a Service and is compatible with many backend technologies, including PowerDNS and BIND. It doesn't provide a DNS service as such as its purpose is to interface with existing DNS servers to manage DNS zones on a per tenant basis.

Search (Searchlight)

Searchlight provides advanced and consistent search capabilities across various OpenStack cloud services. It accomplishes this by offloading user search queries from other OpenStack API servers by indexing their data into ElasticSearch. Searchlight is being integrated into Horizon and also provides a Command-line interface.

Key Manager (Barbican)

Barbican is a REST API designed for the secure storage, provisioning and management of secrets. It is aimed at being useful for all environments, including large ephemeral Clouds.

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