OpenStack Operations Guide

Chapter 8. Lay of the Land

This chapter helps you set up your working environment and use it to take a look around your cloud.

Using the OpenStack Dashboard for Administration

As a cloud administrative user, you can use the OpenStack dashboard to create and manage projects, users, images, and flavors. Users are allowed to create and manage images within specified projects and to share images, depending on the Image Service configuration. Typically, the policy configuration allows admin users only to set quotas and create and manage services. The dashboard provides an Admin tab with a System Panel and Identity Panel. These interfaces give you access to system information and usage as well as to settings for configuring what end users can do. Refer to the OpenStack Admin User Guide for detailed how-to information about using the dashboard as an admin user.

Command-Line Tools

We recommend using a combination of the OpenStack command-line interface (CLI) tools and the OpenStack dashboard for administration. Some users with a background in other cloud technologies may be using the EC2 Compatibility API, which uses naming conventions somewhat different from the native API. We highlight those differences.

We strongly suggest that you install the command-line clients from the Python Package Index (PyPI) instead of from the distribution packages. The clients are under heavy development, and it is very likely at any given time that the version of the packages distributed by your operating-system ...