Terminology

Administration Server

Also called Crowbar Administration Node. Manages all other nodes. It assigns IP addresses to them, PXE boots them, configures them, and provides them the necessary software for their roles. To provide these services, the Administration Server runs Crowbar, Chef, DHCP, TFTP, NTP, and other services.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Block-level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances. One or more storage volumes can be attached to running instances and persist after the instance has been shut down. It is possible to boot from an EBS volume.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon's virtual computing environment.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

A virtual machine that can be created and customized by a user. AMIs can be identified by an ID prefixed with ami-.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

A storage for the Internet that can be used to store and retrieve data on the Web.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

A collection of remote computing services (including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and others) that together make up Amazon's cloud computing platform.

Barclamp

A set of Chef cookbooks, templates, and other logic. Used to apply a particular role to individual nodes or a set of nodes.

Chef

An automated configuration management platform for deployment of your entire cloud infrastructure. The Chef server manages many of the software packages and allows the easy changing of nodes.

Ceph

A massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system. It consists of an object store, a block store, and a POSIX-compliant distributed file system.

Compute Node

Node within a SUSE Cloud. A physical server running a Hypervisor. A Compute Node is a host for guest virtual machines (VMs) that are deployed in the cloud. It starts virtual machines on demand using nova-compute. To split VM load across more than one server, a cloud should contain multiple Compute Nodes.

Controller Node

Node within a SUSE Cloud. The Controller Node is configured through the Administration Server and registers with the Administration Server for all required software. Hosts the OpenStack API endpoints and the OpenStack scheduler and runs the nova services—except for nova-compute, which is run on the Compute Nodes. The Controller Node coordinates everything about cloud VMs: like a central communication center it receives all requests (for example, if a user wants to start or stop a VM) and communicates with the Compute Nodes to coordinate fulfillment of the request. A cloud can contain multiple Controller Nodes.

Cookbook

A collection of Chef recipes which deploy a software stack or functionality. The unit of distribution for Chef.

Crowbar

Bare-metal installer and an extension of Chef server. The primary function of Crowbar is to get new hardware into a state where it can be managed by Chef. That means: Setting up BIOS and RAID, network, installing a basic operating system, and setting up services like DNS, NTP, and DHCP. The Crowbar server manages all nodes, supplying configuration of hardware and software.

Ephemeral Disk

Ephemeral disks offer machine local disk storage linked to the lifecycle of a virtual machine instance. When a virtual machine is terminated, all data on the ephemeral disk is lost. Ephemeral disks are not included in any snapshots.

Flavor

The compute, memory, and storage capacity of nova computing instances (in terms of virtual CPUs, RAM, etc.).

Hybrid Cloud

One of several deployment models for a cloud infrastructure. A composition of both public and private clouds that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized technology for enabling data and application portability.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

A service model of cloud computing where processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources are rented over the Internet. It allows the customer to deploy and run arbitrary software, including operating systems and applications. The customer has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications but does not control the underlying cloud infrastructure. Housing and maintaining it is in the responsibility of the service provider.

Instance

A virtual machine that runs inside the cloud.

Node

A (physical) server that is managed by Crowbar.

OpenStack

A collection of open source software to build and manage public and private clouds. Its components are designed to work together to provide Infrastructure as a Service and massively scalable cloud computing software.

At the same time, OpenStack is also a community and a project.

OpenStack Compute (Nova)

One of the core OpenStack components and services. It is a cloud computing fabric controller and as such, the main part of an IaaS system. It provides virtual machines on demand.

OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon)

One of the core OpenStack components or services. It provides a modular Web interface for OpenStack services and allows end users and administrators to interact with each OpenStack service through the service's API.

OpenStack Identity (Keystone)

One of the core OpenStack components or services. It provides authentication and authorization for all OpenStack services.

OpenStack Image (Glance)

One of the core OpenStack components or services. It provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for virtual disk images.

OpenStack Network (Quantum)

One of the core OpenStack components or services. It provides network connectivity as a service between interface devices (for example, vNICs) managed by other OpenStack services (for example, nova). Allows users to create their own networks and attach interfaces to them.

OpenStack Object Store (Swift)

One of the core OpenStack components or services. Allows to store and retrieve files while providing built-in redundancy and fail-over. Can be used for backing up and archiving data, streaming data to a user's Web browser, or developing new applications with data storage integration.

OpenStack Service

A collection of Linux services (or daemons) that work together to provide core functionality within the OpenStack project, like storing objects, providing virtual servers, or authentication and authorization. All services have code names (noted in brackets), which are also used in configuration files and command line programs that belong to the service.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

A service model of cloud computing where a computing platform and cloud-based application development tools are rented over the Internet. The customer controls software deployment and configuration settings, but not the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage.

Project

A concept in OpenStack Identity. Used to identify a group, an organization, or a project. Also called tenant. The term tenant is primarily used in the OpenStack command line tools, but occasionally also appears in the SUSE Cloud Dashboard.

Proposal

Special configuration for a Barclamp. It includes Barclamp-specific settings, and a list of nodes to which the proposal should be applied.

Private Cloud

One of several deployment models for a cloud infrastructure. The infrastructure is operated exclusively for a single organization and may exist on or off premises. The cloud is owned and managed by the organization itself, by a third party or a combination of both.

Public Cloud

One of several deployment models for a cloud infrastructure. The cloud infrastructure is designed for use by the general public and exists on the premises of the cloud provider. Services like applications, storage, and other resources are made available to the general public for free or are offered on a pay-per-use model. The infrastructure is owned and managed by a business, academic or government organization, or some combination of these.

qcow (QEMU Copy on Write)

A disk image format supported by the QEMU virtual machine manager. A qcow2 image helps to optimize disk space as it consumes disk space only when contents are written on it and grows as data is added.

qcow2 is a more recent version of the qcow format where a read-only base image is used, and all writes are stored to the qcow2 image.

Quota

Restriction of resources to prevent overconsumption within a cloud. In OpenStack, quotas are defined per project and contain multiple parameters, such as amount of RAM, number of instances, or number of floating IP addresses.

Recipe

A group of Chef scripts and templates. Recipes are used by Chef to deploy a unit of functionality.

Role

In the Crowbar/Chef context: an instance of a Proposal that is active on a node.

In the OpenStack Identity (Keystone) context: concept of controlling the actions that a user is allowed to perform.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A service model of cloud computing where applications are hosted by a service provider and made available to customers remotely as a Web-based service.

Storage Node

Node within a SUSE Cloud. Acts as the controller for cloud-based storage. A cloud can contain multiple Storage Nodes.

Tenant

See Project.

Security Group

Concept in OpenStack Compute. A collection of network access rules, like firewall policies. The access rules specify which incoming network traffic should be delivered to all virtual machines in the group. All other incoming traffic is discarded.

Volume

Detachable block storage device. Unlike a SAN, it can only be attached to one instance at a time.


SUSE Cloud Deployment Guide 1.0