Welcome to Glance’s documentation!

The Glance project provides a service where users can upload and discover data assets that are meant to be used with other services. This currently includes images and metadata definitions.

Glance image services include discovering, registering, and retrieving virtual machine images. Glance has a RESTful API that allows querying of VM image metadata as well as retrieval of the actual image.

Note

The Images API v1 has been DEPRECATED in the Newton release. The migration path is to use the Images API v2 instead of version 1 of the API. The Images API v1 will ultimately be removed, following the OpenStack standard deprecation policy.

VM images made available through Glance can be stored in a variety of locations from simple filesystems to object-storage systems like the OpenStack Swift project.

Glance, as with all OpenStack projects, is written with the following design guidelines in mind:

• 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

This documentation is generated by the Sphinx toolkit and lives in the source tree. Additional documentation on Glance and other components of OpenStack can be found on the OpenStack wiki.

Glance Background Concepts

• Basic architecture
• Glance database architecture
• Domain model
• Glance domain model implementation
• Image Identifiers
• Image Statuses
• Task Statuses
• Tasks
• Disk and Container Formats
• Common Image Properties
• Metadata Definition Concepts

Installing/Configuring Glance

• Installation
• Basic Configuration
• Glance Sample Configuration
• Authentication With Keystone
• Policies
• Image Location Strategy Modules
• Glance Artifact Types
• Glance Flow Plugins
• Property Protections
• Glance Configuration Options
• Requirements

Operating Glance

• Controlling Glance Servers
• Database Management
• The Glance Image Cache
• Notifications

Using Glance

• Using Glance’s Image Public APIs
• Using Glance’s Client Tools
• Using Glance’s Metadata Definitions Catalog Public APIs
• Image Signature Verification

Glance Manual Pages

• glance-api
• glance-cache-cleaner
• glance-cache-manage
• glance-cache-prefetcher
• glance-cache-pruner
• glance-control
• glance-manage
• glance-registry
• glance-replicator
• glance-scrubber
• Modules

Contributing to Glance

• Glance Contribution Guidelines

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page