OpenStack Major components

OpenStack Neutron is an SDN networking project focused on delivering networking-as-a-service (NaaS) in virtual compute environments.

What is Mistral?

Mistral is a workflow service. Lots of computations in computer systems nowadays can be represented as processes that consist of multiple interconnected steps that need to run in a particular order. Those steps are often interactions with components distributed across different machines: real hardware machines, cloud virtual machines or containers. Mistral provides capabilities to automate such processes.

Particularly, Mistral can be used, for example, for solving administrator tasks related to managing clusters of software, or for any other tasks that span multiple components and take long to complete. It can also be used as a central component for deploying distributed software in a truly large scale. In any case where the ability to track the progress of the activity becomes crucial, Mistral is a good fit.

A Mistral user can describe such a process as a set of tasks and transitions between them, and upload such a definition to Mistral, which will take care of state management, correct execution order, parallelism, synchronization and high availability. In Mistral terminology such a set of tasks and relations between them is called a workflow.

openstack heat cloudformation

Heat is the main project in the OpenStack Orchestration program. It implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code.

OpenStack Zun 

Zun (ex. Higgins) is the OpenStack Containers service. It aims to provide an API service for running application containers without the need to manage servers or clusters.

Architecture

Zun API: Process REST requests and validate inputted parameters.

Zun Compute: Launch containers and manage compute resources in localhost.

Keystone: Authenticate incoming requests.

Neutron: Provide networking for containers.

Glance: An option to store container images (another option is DockerHub).

Kuryr: A Docker network plugin for connecting containers to neutron networks.

Qinling(Function as a Service in OpenStack)

Qinling is Function as a Service for OpenStack. This project aims to provide a platform to support serverless functions (like AWS Lambda). Qinling could support different container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes/Swarm, etc.) and different function package storage backends (local/Swift/S3) by nature using plugin mechanism.

What is Swift?

The OpenStack Object Store project, known as Swift, offers cloud storage software so that you can store and retrieve lots of data with a simple API. It's built for scale and optimized for durability, availability, and concurrency across the entire data set. Swift is ideal for storing unstructured data that can grow without bound.

OpenStack Cinder 

Cinder is a Block Storage service for OpenStack. It's designed to present storage resources to end users that can be consumed by the OpenStack Compute Project (Nova). This is done through the use of either a reference implementation (LVM) or plugin drivers for other storage. The short description of Cinder is that it virtualizes the management of block storage devices and provides end users with a self service API to request and consume those resources without requiring any knowledge of where their storage is actually deployed or on what type of device.

Octavia is an open source, operator-scale load balancing solution designed to work with OpenStack.

Octavia was borne out of the Neutron LBaaS project. Its conception influenced the transformation of the Neutron LBaaS project, as Neutron LBaaS moved from version 1 to version 2. Starting with the Liberty release of OpenStack, Octavia has become the reference implementation for Neutron LBaaS version 2.

Oenstack Octavia accomplishes its delivery of load balancing services by managing a fleet of virtual machines, containers, or bare metal servers—collectively known as amphorae— which it spins up on demand. This on-demand, horizontal scaling feature differentiates Octavia from other load balancing solutions, thereby making Octavia truly suited “for the cloud.”

OpenStack Horizon 

Horizon is the canonical implementation of OpenStack’s Dashboard, which provides a web based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, etc.