OpenStack Operations Guide
by Tom Fifield, Diane Fleming, Anne Gentle, Lorin Hochstein, Jonathan Proulx, Everett Toews, Joe Topjian
Chapter 6. Storage Decisions
Storage is found in many parts of the OpenStack stack, and the differing types can cause confusion to even experienced cloud engineers. This section focuses on persistent storage options you can configure with your cloud. It’s important to understand the distinction between ephemeral storage and persistent storage.
Ephemeral Storage
If you deploy only the OpenStack Compute Service (nova), your users do not have access to any form of persistent storage by default. The disks associated with VMs are “ephemeral,” meaning that (from the user’s point of view) they effectively disappear when a virtual machine is terminated.
Persistent Storage
Persistent storage means that the storage resource outlives any other resource and is always available, regardless of the state of a running instance.
Today, OpenStack clouds explicitly support two types of persistent storage: object storage and block storage.
Object Storage
With object storage, users access binary objects through a REST API. You may be familiar with Amazon S3, which is a well-known example of an object storage system. Object storage is implemented in OpenStack by the OpenStack Object Storage (swift) project. If your intended users need to archive or manage large datasets, you want to provide them with object storage. In addition, OpenStack can store your virtual machine (VM) images inside of an object storage system, as an alternative to storing the images on a file system.
OpenStack Object Storage provides ...
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