⁠Chapter 1. Introduction

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform provides the foundation to build a private or public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It offers a massively scalable, fault-tolerant platform for the development of cloud-enabled workloads.

The current Red Hat system is based on OpenStack Juno, and packaged so that available physical hardware can be turned into a private, public, or hybrid cloud platform including:

Fully distributed object storage
Persistent block-level storage
Virtual-machine provisioning engine and image storage
Authentication and authorization mechanism
Integrated networking
Web browser-based GUI for both users and administration.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform IaaS cloud is implemented by a collection of interacting services that control its computing, storage, and networking resources. The cloud is managed using a web-based interface which allows administrators to control, provision, and automate OpenStack resources. Additionally, the OpenStack infrastructure is facilitated through an extensive API, which is also available to end users of the cloud.

⁠1.1. Architecture

The following diagram provides a high-level overview of the OpenStack architecture.

⁠

Figure 1.1. OpenStack Architecture

Each OpenStack service has a code name, which is reflected in the names of configuration files and command-line utility programs. For example, the Identity service has a configuration file called keystone.conf.

⁠

Table 1.1. Services

Service	Code Name	Description
Dashboard	Horizon	A web-based dashboard for managing OpenStack services.
Identity	Keystone	A centralized Identity service that provides authentication and authorization for other services, and manages users, tenants, and roles.
OpenStack Networking	Neutron	A networking service that provides connectivity between the interfaces of other OpenStack services.
Block Storage	Cinder	A service that manages persistent block storage volumes for virtual machines.
Compute	Nova	A service that manages and provisions virtual machines running on hypervisor nodes.
Image	Glance	A registry service for storing resources such as virtual machine images and volume snapshots.
Object Storage	Swift	A service providing object storage which allows users to store and retrieve files (arbitrary data).
Telemetry	Ceilometer	A service providing measurements of cloud resources.
Orchestration	Heat	A service providing a template-based orchestration engine, which supports the automatic creation of resource stacks.

Each OpenStack service is comprised of a collection of Linux services, MariaDB databases, or other components, which together provide a functional group. For example, the glance-api and glance-registry Linux services, together with a MariaDB database, implement the Image service.