glance/doc/source/architecture.rst
Brian Waldon 6e2f39d69b Removing registry spec from docs
* Rewords how we refer to to our 'reference' implementation of the registry
  API. glance-registry is an implementation detail of the main glance API, not
  an example of a community-driven API spec
* Remove duplicate 'gettingstarted' information
* Fixes bug 954554

Change-Id: I889f61a399c398897f2146b756b2c3c310847718
2012-03-13 16:26:19 -07:00

2.3 KiB

Glance Architecture

Glance is designed to be as adaptable as possible for various back-end storage and registry database solutions. There is a main Glance API server (the glance-api program) that serves as the communications hub between various client programs, the registry of image metadata, and the storage systems that actually contain the virtual machine image data.

From a birdseye perspective, one can visualize the Glance architectural model like so:

digraph birdseye {

node [fontsize=10 fontname="Monospace"] a [label="Client A"] b [label="Client B"] c [label="Client C"] d [label="Glance API Server"] e [label="Registry Server"] f [label="Store Adapter"] g [label="S3 Store"] h [label="Swift Store"] i [label="Filesystem Store"] j [label="HTTP Store"] a -> d [dir=both] b -> d [dir=both] c -> d [dir=both] d -> e [dir=both] d -> f [dir=both] f -> g [dir=both] f -> h [dir=both] f -> i [dir=both] f -> j [dir=both]

}

What is a Registry Server?

A registry server is a service that publishes image metadata for internal consumption by the Glance API server. The Glance registry server uses a SQL database for its metdata storage.

What is a Store?

A store is a Python class that inherits from glance.store.Backend and conforms to that class' API for reading, writing, and deleting virtual machine image data.

Glance currently ships with stores for S3, Swift, RBD, a simple filesystem store, and a read-only HTTP(S) store.

Implementors are encouraged to create stores for other backends, including other distributed storage systems like Sheepdog.