Introduction to Fuel¶

Fuel is an open-source software application that simplifies the deployment of highly available OpenStack environments, as well as enables you to manage your OpenStack environments after deployment.

Fuel provides a web user interface (WUI), as well as a command-line user interface (CLI) and RESTful API for provisioning, configuration, and management of OpenStack environments. A link to the Horizon OpenStack Dashboard appears in the Fuel web UI after you deploy an OpenStack environment.

Using Fuel you can:

• Deploy multiple highly-available OpenStack environments on virtual or bare metal hardware.
• Configure and verify network configurations.
• Test interoperability between the OpenStack components.
• Easily scale your OpenStack environment by adding and removing nodes.

Fuel architecture includes:

Fuel Master node

A server with the installed Fuel application that performs initial configuration, provisioning, and PXE booting of the Fuel Slave nodes, as well as assigning the IP addresses to the Fuel Slave nodes.

Fuel Slave node

In the Fuel project terminology, a generic term that describes a server that is provisioned by the Fuel Master node. A Fuel Slave node can be a controller, compute, or storage node, among others. These terms are interchangeable with the OpenStack terminology.