OpenStack components

OpenStack is a modular system. Although some OpenStack Architects choose to implement a reference architecture of all of the core components shipped by an OpenStack distributor, many will only implement the services required to meet their business cases.

Reference implementations are typically used for development use cases where the final production state of the service might not be well-defined. Production deployments will likely gate the availability of some services to reduce the amount of configuration and testing required for implementation. Reference deployments will typically not vary from the distributor's implementation so that the distributor's deployment and testing tools can be reused without modification.

In this book, we'll be focusing on the following core components of OpenStack.