Swift is an object store. It is scalable up to multiple petabytes and billions of
objects. It is elastic. It has built-in redundancy and failover. Swift is designed
to store a very large number of objects distributed across a set of commodity
hardware.
Networking Service: Neutron
Neutron provides networking as a service between interface devices (for
example, vNICs) managed by other OpenStack services (for example, Nova).
Identity Service: Keystone
Keystone is the identity service used for authentication (authN) and high-
level authorization (authZ). It supports token-based authN and user-service
authorization.
Imaging Service: Glance
Glance is a lookup and retrieval system for VM images. It can use one of
three back ends: OpenStack Object Store, S3 storage, or S3 Storage using the
OpenStack Object Store as an intermediary.
Dashboard: Horizon
Horizon is the standard implementation of OpenStack’s Dashboard, which
provides a web-based user interface to OpenStack services, including Nova,
Swift, Neutron, Keystone, and so on.
Learning More
OpenStack has many more features not discussed here, including the
following:
OpenStack Heat—For orchestration and management of infrastructure
and applications within an OpenStack cloud; see
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Heat
OpenStack Ironic—A bare metal provisioning program; see
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/IronicSee https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ProjectTeams for a current list of official