OpenStack: An Overview

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that uses pooled virtual resources to build and manage private and public clouds. This article explains how it works, and gives a detailed overview of a few of its components.

- Ashutosh S.Bhakare

As per Wiki, OpenStack was developed in 2010 as a joint project between Rackspace Hosting and NASA. Since 2012 it is being managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. By 2018, more than 500 companies had joined the project. The OpenStack Foundation was renamed the Open Infrastructure Foundation in 2021.

The first open source version of OpenStack was Austin, which had three services. Currently, we have a Yoga version with 38 different services. Figure 1 shows the entire architecture of OpenStack with its nine components. Let’s discuss these in detail.

Dashboard: Here, the Horizon service is responsible for managing OpenStack using the console.

Identity service: Keystone is the service that carries out authentication and authorisation with the help of the AMQP service. This service is also responsible for creating and managing users, roles, domains and projects.