OpenStack is an open source software platform for building and managing public and private cloud infrastructure. It is being governed by an independent, non-profit foundation known as the OpenStack foundation. It has the largest and the most active community, which is backed by technology giants such as HP, Red Hat, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Rackspace, and many more. OpenStack's idea for a cloud is that it should be simple to implement and massively scalable.

OpenStack is considered as the cloud operating system where users are allowed to instantly deploy hundreds of virtual machines in an automated way. It also provides an efficient way of hassle free management of these machines. OpenStack is known for its dynamic scale up, scale out, and distributed architecture capabilities, making your cloud environment robust and future-ready. OpenStack provides an enterprise class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform for all your cloud needs.

As shown in the preceding diagram, OpenStack is made up of several different software components that work together to provide cloud services. Out of all these components, in this chapter, we will focus on Cinder and Glance, which provide block storage and image services respectively. For more information on OpenStack components, please visit http://www.openstack.org/.