Introduction

OpenStack Compute, also known as Nova, is the compute component of the open source cloud operating system, OpenStack. It is the component that allows you to run multiple instances of multiple types across any number of hosts that run the OpenStack Compute service, allowing you to create a highly scalable and redundant cloud environment. The open source project strives to be hardware and hypervisor agnostic. OpenStack Compute powers some of the biggest compute clouds such as the Rackspace Open Cloud.

This chapter gets you to speed up quickly by giving you the information you need to provide a cloud environment. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to create and access virtual machines using the OpenStack tools. The following figure shows the OpenStack architecture we are working with in this chapter:

Tip

We are specifically working with the Compute block of the figure.