The open-source, modular cloud platform OpenStack. (IAAS platform). Customers to deploy applications in a software-defined datacentre. The platform is divided into a number of projects, each of which delivers part of the infrastructure.SDDC – Software Dfined Data Centrethree core components of the software-defined data center: network virtualization, server virtualization and storage virtualizationOpenStack ComponentsThere are currently seven core components of OpenStack: Compute, Object Storage, Identity, Dashboard, Block Storage, Network and Image Service. Let’s look at each in turn:

Object Store (codenamed “Swift“) allows you to store or retrieve files (but not mount directories like a fileserver). Several companies provide commercial storage services based on Swift. These include KT, Rackspace (from which Swift originated) and Hewlett-Packard. Swift is also used internally at many large companies to store their data.

Image Store (codenamed ““Glance) provides a catalog and repository for virtual disk images. These disk images are mostly commonly used in OpenStack Compute.

Compute (codenamed “Nova“) provides virtual servers upon demand. Rackspace  and HP provide commercial compute services built on Nova and it is used internally at companies like Mercado Libre, Comcast, Best Buy and NASA (where it originated).

Dashboard (codenamed “Horizon“) provides a modular web-based user interface for all the OpenStack services. With this web GUI, you can perform most operations on your cloud like launching an instance, assigning IP addresses and setting access controls.

Identity (codenamed “Keystone“) provides authentication and authorization for all the OpenStack services. It also provides a service catalog of services within a particular OpenStack cloud.

Network (which used to named “Quantum” but is in the process of being renamed due to a trademark issue) provides “network connectivity as a service” between interface devices managed by other OpenStack services (most likely Nova). The service works by allowing users to create their own networks and then attach interfaces to them. Quantum has a pluggable architecture to support many popular networking vendors and technologies.

Block Storage (codenamed “Cinder“) provides persistent block storage to guest VMs. This project was born from code originally in Nova (the nova-volume service that has been depricated). While this was originally a block storage only service,   it has been extended to NFS shares.

In addition to these core projects, there are also a number of non-core projects that will be included in future OpenStack releases.