Components of OpenStack

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that is composed of several individual components or projects. These individual components communicate with each other using an application programming interface(API). This makes it possible to install these components on either a single machine or several machines connected to each other on IP layer.

These individual components have already been briefly discussed in Chapter 1, Getting Started with the Orchestration Service for OpenStack; therefore, we will not repeat them again in this chapter. However, we will explain how these components can be integrated with each other using OpenStack API and IP connectivity.

The following diagram shows the main components of OpenStack installed on the three nodes: