User Glossary
- Joel Davies
- Chris Green
- 1 Arided
- 2 Blazar
- 3 Ceilometer
- 4 Ceph
- 5 Cinder
- 6 Cluster
- 7 Docker
- 8 Echo
- 9 Flavour / Flavor
- 10 Floating IP
- 11 Glance
- 12 Gnocchi
- 13 Heat
- 14 IaaS
- 15 Image
- 16 Key Pair
- 17 Keystone
- 18 Kubernetes
- 19 Load Balancer
- 20 Magnum
- 21 Manila
- 22 Neutron
- 23 Nova
- 24 Object Storage
- 25 Octavia
- 26 OpenStack
- 27 Placement
- 28 Project
- 29 Sirius
- 30 Swift
- 31 Volume
Arided
A Ceph cluster that will be used to provide storage for Manilla.
Blazar
The OpenStack resource reservation component. This provides the ability to reserve compute resources for use in the future.
Ceilometer
An OpenStack data collector service that feeds into Gnocchi and Aodh.
Ceph
An open source software defined storage platform.
Cinder
The OpenStack persistent block storage component. This provides volumes of storage to Nova VMs.
Cluster
A group of resources (Nova instances, Neutron networks, security groups etc) combined to function as one system.
Docker
An open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications in a loosely isolated environment called a container. These contain everything the application needs to run making them highly portable.
Echo
A Ceph cluster object store that will be used to provide storage for Swift.
Flavour / Flavor
A flavour specifies the compute, memory, and storage capacity of Nova computing instances. They represent the available hardware configurations for new VMs.
Floating IP
A static public IP address that is externally routable and is therefore accessible from outside of STFC and its VPN.
Glance
The OpenStack image store. This provides services and associated libraries to store, browse, share, distribute and manage bootable disk images for VMs as well as metadata and other data used when initialising compute resources.
Gnocchi
The OpenStack data collection service. This stores and indexes time series data from Nova, Neutron, Cinder and Ceilometer.
Heat
The OpenStack orchestration service. This can be used deploy whole services with a single template.
IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). A service that can provide virtual machines on demand.
Image
A virtual machine image is a file that contains a virtual disk containing a bootable operating system, such as Rocky8 or Ubuntu.
Key Pair
A combination of a public key used to encrypt data and a private key used to decrypt data. Typically used in the context of using SSH to connect to a remote machine.
Keystone
The OpenStack identity and service catalogue component. This is responsible for the authentication of users and determines what they have access to.
Kubernetes
An open source container orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications typically using Docker. This also provides load balancing and can be very useful for the deployment of applications to many machines at once enabling scaling and redundancy.
Load Balancer
Distributes incoming network traffic across multiple machines reducing the load on each individual one. These can be created using OpenStack Octavia.
Magnum
The OpenStack container orchestration as a service component. Used for providing Kubernetes.
Magnum is currently under review / partially deprecated.
Manila
The OpenStack fileshares component. This provides storage provisioning for shared and distributed file systems.
Neutron
The networking OpenStack component responsible for provisioning the virtual or physical networks that compute instances connect to.
Nova
The compute component of OpenStack. This provides a way of provisioning compute instances e.g. VMs.
Object Storage
A storage architecture that manages data as objects containing both data and metadata along with a unique identifier. Particularly useful for storing large amounts of unstructured data.
https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/data-storage/file-block-object-storage
https://stfc.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CLOUDKB/pages/267845881
Octavia
The OpenStack Loadbalancer as a service component. This can be used to manage a fleet of VMs, containers or bare metal servers and can start up more on demand ensuring the scalability of services.
OpenStack
An open source IaaS platform that controls and provisions a large pool of compute, storage, and networking resources. It is made up of various component services some of which are listed of below.
Placement
An OpenStack component which tracks available resources on the platform, mainly used by Nova where it assists in choosing which resources to allocate to new VMs.
Project
In the context of OpenStack, a project is a group of zero or more users and is used to associate various permissions such as the images users have access to.
Sirius
A Ceph cluster used for storage of virtual disks created for c flavour VMs and for created volumes.
Swift
The OpenStack object & blob storage component.
Volume
A block of storage that may be attached and detached from VMs similar to a USB drive. These may only be attached to one VM at a time.