Swift – Object Storage
Object store allows you to store or retrieve files. It provides a fully distributed, API-accessible storage platform that can be directly integrated into applications or used for backup, archiving and data retention.
Note: Object Storage is not a traditional file system, but rather a distributed storage system for static data such as virtual machine images, or photos, e-mails, backups and archives.
- Proxy server (swift-proxy-server) accepts incoming requests, like files to upload, modifications to metadata or container creation; it also serves files and provides container listing
- Accounts server manage accounts defined within the object storage service.
- Container servers manage mapping of containers, folders, within the object store service.
- Object servers manage actual objects, files, on the storage nodes.
Also replication services run to provide consistency and availability across the cluster, audit and update.
Ceilometer - Telemetry
The required steps to bill for usage in a cloud environment are metering, rating and billing. Because the provider's requirements may be far too specific for a shared solution, rating and billing solutions cannot be designed as a common module that satisfies all possible scenarios. Providing users with measurements on cloud services is required to meet the "measured service" definition of cloud computing.
The Telemetry module was originally designed to support billing systems for OpenStack cloud resources. This project only covers the metering portion of the required processing for billing. The module collects information about the system and stores it in the form of samples in order to provide data about anything that can be billed.
The list of metrics is continuously growing, which makes it possible to use the data collected by Telemetry for many more purposes other than billing. For example Heat can autoscale resources when Ceilometers triggers an alarm, for example adding more front-end web servers when CPU utilization is more than 70% for 5 minutes.
Other projects
Although the former ones are the most relevant, there are three other projects worth mentioning:
- Trove is a database-as-a-service provisioning relational and non-relational database engines. It allows an agnostic access to databases, currently supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, but vendors like Oracle and Microsoft might provide a Trove plugin for their databases in future.
- Ironic (Bare Metal Provisioning), is an incubated OpenStack project that aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines. Ironic is currently in use by HP Helion.
- Zaqar (Multiple Tenant Cloud Messaging), is a multi-tenant cloud messaging service for Web developers. Zaqar was formerly known as Marconi.
- Designate provides a DNS as a Service for OpenStack.
