← back
2020-09-16: a brief overview of OpenStack
Several independent cloud companies depend on a unique
operating system that allows sysadmins to take advantage of
the numerous resources that might be present in a datacentre,
notably compute power or storage or networking capability.
Called OpenStack
it allows for many of the features that one might expect from
GCP, AWS, or Azure. A summary of some of the components are
listed below:
-
Nova:
a compute instance, typical in the form of a VM
-
Zun:
container service that spins up containers backed by different technologies
-
Qinling:
platform to support serverless function, akin to AWS Lambda
-
Ironic:
baremetal provisioning service
-
Cyborg:
general purpose framework for handling accelerators, such as GPUs, FPGAs
-
Swift:
object storage, similar to AWS buckets
-
Cinder:
block storage, similar to persistent volumes in GCP
-
Manila:
coordinated access to shared or distributed file systems
-
Neutron:
networking functionality, similar to CNI
-
Octavia:
load balancer
-
Designate:
DNS functionality
-
Keystone:
identity service
-
Zaqar:
messaging service, similar to SQS or SNS
-
Magnum:
container orchestration engine, for stuff like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos
-
Trove:
database provision service, for relational and non-relational engines
Of note are the Zun Capsules, which is roughly equal to
Kubernetes Pods, which use Neutron as the networking
component, and Cinder as the block storage. This allows for
a Kubernetes-like environment similar to other Cloud vendors.
Additional information about the various OpenStack components
can be found here.