Heat is a service to orchestrate composite cloud applications
using a declarative template format through an OpenStack-native REST API.
Heat’s purpose and vision
- Heat provides a template based orchestration for describing a cloud
application by executing appropriate OpenStack API calls to generate
running cloud applications.
- A Heat template describes the infrastructure for a cloud application in text
files which are readable and writable by humans, and can be managed by version
control tools.
- Templates specify the relationships between resources (e.g. this
volume is connected to this server). This enables Heat to call out to the
OpenStack APIs to create all of your infrastructure in the correct order to
completely launch your application.
- The software integrates other components of OpenStack. The templates allow
creation of most OpenStack resource types (such as instances, floating ips,
volumes, security groups, users, etc), as well as some more advanced
functionality such as instance high availability, instance autoscaling, and
nested stacks.
- Heat primarily manages infrastructure, but the templates
integrate well with software configuration management tools such as Puppet and
Ansible.
- Operators can customise the capabilities of Heat by installing plugins.
This documentation offers information aimed at end-users, operators and
developers of Heat.