OpenStack is an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform for building private and hybrid clouds with modular services for compute, networking, storage, identity, and orchestration. It provides a flexible, scalable foundation for cloud infrastructure with multi-tenant isolation and self-service provisioning.
OpenStack is governed by the OpenInfra Foundation (formerly OpenStack Foundation) and developed by a global community of contributors and enterprises.
- Modular services with specialized components:
- Nova - Compute instance management
- Neutron - Networking as a Service
- Cinder - Block Storage
- Swift - Object Storage
- Glance - Image Service
- Keystone - Identity Service
- Horizon - Dashboard UI
- Heat - Orchestration
- Ironic - Bare Metal Provisioning
- Magnum - Container Orchestration
- Manila - Shared Filesystems
- Octavia - Load Balancing
- Multi-tenant architecture with project/domain isolation
- API-first control plane with RESTful interfaces
- Pluggable backend ecosystem for networking (ML2, OVS, OVN) and storage
- Support for live migration, high availability, and disaster recovery
- Private cloud infrastructure for enterprise workloads
- Multi-tenant virtual infrastructure hosting (service providers)
- Hybrid cloud foundations with self-service provisioning
- Telco cloud and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) deployments
- Research and academic cloud computing platforms
- Edge cloud infrastructure
- Core Language: Python
- Database: MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL
- Message Queue: RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ
- Web Server: Apache httpd, uWSGI
- Hypervisors: KVM, QEMU, VMware ESXi, Hyper-V
- Networking: Open vSwitch (OVS), OVN, Linux Bridge
- ✅ Active open-source cloud platform with regular coordinated releases
- Latest release: 2025.2 “Flamingo” (released October 1, 2025)
- Current development: 2026.1 “Gazpacho” (SLURP release, estimated April 2026)
- Planned: 2026.2 “Hibiscus” (estimated September 2026)
- Release cycle: 6-month coordinated releases (April and October)
- Maintenance: 2025.2 Flamingo maintained until ~April 2027
- EUS releases: Skip Level Upgrade Release Process (SLURP) for extended support
- Deployments: 40+ million cores managed worldwide
- Kolla-Ansible - Containerized OpenStack deployment with Ansible
- OpenStack-Ansible - Bare-metal and LXC-based deployment
- TripleO - OpenStack-on-OpenStack deployment (legacy)
- Charms - Ubuntu Juju charms for OpenStack
- Helm charts - Kubernetes-based deployments
¶ History and References