Cloud Vedas: OpenStack Crash Course

Openstack Neutron is the networking service. It is similar to AWS VPC or Azure VNET.

Manual and automatic management of networks and IP addresses.
Distinct networking models for different applications and user groups.
Flat networks (VLAN’s) for separating servers and traffic.
Supports both Static IP addresses and DHCP.
Floating IP addresses for dynamic rerouting to resources on the network.
Software-defined networking (SDN), OpenFlow, for multi-tenancy and scalability.
Management of intrusion detection systems (IDS), load balancing, firewalls, VPN’s, etc.

Glance is image service of OpenStack. It’s similar to AWS AMI and Azure VM Images.

OpenStack Image Service for discovery, registration, and delivery of services for disk and server images
Template-building from stored images
Storage and cataloging of unlimited backups
REST interface for querying disk image information
Streaming of images to servers
VMware integration, with vMotion Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) and live migration of running virtual machines
All OpenStack OS images built on virtual machines
Maintenance of image metadata
Creation, deletion, sharing, and duplification of images

Openstack Nova is the equivalent of AWS EC2 instances or Azure VMs.

It’s an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering.
Provides management and automation of pools of Virtual Machines
Bare metal and high-performance computing (HPC) configurations
It supports KVM, VMware, and Xen hypervisor virtualization
Hyper-V and LXC containerization
Python-based with various external libraries: Eventlet for concurrent programming, Kombu for AMQP communication, SQLAlchemy for database access, etc.
Designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware with no proprietary hardware or software requirements
Inter operable with legacy systems