OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) documentation¶
What is Cinder?¶
Cinder is the OpenStack Block Storage service for providing volumes to Nova virtual machines, Ironic bare metal hosts, containers and more. Some of the goals of Cinder are to be/have:
Component based architecture: Quickly add new behaviors
Highly available: Scale to very serious workloads
Fault-Tolerant: Isolated processes avoid cascading failures
Recoverable: Failures should be easy to diagnose, debug, and rectify
Open Standards: Be a reference implementation for a community-driven api
For end users¶
As an end user of Cinder, you’ll use Cinder to create and manage volumes using the Horizon user interface, command line tools such as the python-cinderclient, or by directly using the REST API.
Tools for using Cinder¶
Horizon: The official web UI for the OpenStack Project.
OpenStack Client: The official CLI for OpenStack Projects. You should use this as your CLI for most things, it includes not just nova commands but also commands for most of the projects in OpenStack.
Cinder Client: The openstack CLI is recommended, but there are some advanced features and administrative commands that are not yet available there. For CLI access to these commands, the cinder CLI can be used instead.
Using the Cinder API¶
All features of Cinder are exposed via a REST API that can be used to build more complicated logic or automation with Cinder. This can be consumed directly or via various SDKs. The following resources can help you get started consuming the API directly.
For operators¶
This section has details for deploying and maintaining Cinder services.
Installing Cinder¶
Cinder can be configured standalone using the configuration setting
auth_strategy = noauth, but in most cases you will want to at least have
the Keystone Identity
service and other
OpenStack services installed.
Reference¶
Contents:
Additional resources¶
For contributors¶
Contributions to Cinder are welcome. There can be a lot of background information needed to get started. This section should help get you started. Please feel free to also ask any questions in the #openstack-cinder IRC channel.
