# OpenStack

> Open source software for building your own cloud on your own servers.

- Level: Advanced
- Topics: Cloud
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/openstack/
- In Spanish: [OpenStack](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/openstack/)

**OpenStack** is a free, open source collection of software that turns a room full of ordinary servers into a cloud. Teams can create virtual machines, disks, networks and storage on demand, through a web dashboard or an API, much as they would on AWS, but on hardware their organization controls. It started in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace and NASA, and today it is developed by a large open community.

It is made of separate services that work together, each with its own code name. Nova runs virtual machines, Neutron handles networking, Cinder provides disks, Swift stores objects, Keystone manages identities and permissions, and Horizon is the web dashboard. New versions come out on a six-month cycle.

Telecom operators, research centers like CERN, universities and some regional cloud providers use it to run private clouds or their own public cloud services, often to keep data in a specific country or to avoid depending on a single vendor. The price is complexity: installing, upgrading and operating OpenStack well takes a skilled team, which is why many organizations buy it packaged and supported by a company such as Red Hat or Canonical.

## An analogy

If AWS is a hotel where you rent rooms, OpenStack is the blueprints, furniture and booking system to run a hotel in your own building: you get the same kind of rooms, but you are the one running the place.

## Keep in mind

- Free software to build a private or public cloud on your own servers.
- Born in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace and NASA.
- Made of services like Nova (compute), Neutron (network) and Swift (storage).
- Powerful but complex: it takes a skilled team to run it.

## Go deeper

- [OpenStack (official site)](https://www.openstack.org/)
- [OpenStack software components](https://www.openstack.org/software/)
- [OpenStack on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack)

## Related terms

- [Open source](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/open-source/): Software whose code anyone can read, use, change and share.
- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.
- [Virtual machine](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/virtual-machine/): A complete computer made of software, running inside a real one.
- [Dashboard](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/dashboard/): One screen of charts and numbers that shows how something is doing at a glance.
- [API](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/api/): The menu of things one program lets another program ask for.
- [Swift](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/swift/): Apple's programming language for building apps for iPhone, Mac and its other devices.
- [Private cloud](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/private-cloud/): Cloud-style computing reserved for a single organization.