Searchlight Use Cases¶

Below are the use cases of Searchlight:

• Cloud resources lookup: whenever the user needs to query some information of the desired OpenStack services (e.g. Nova, Neutron, etc.), instead of using the service’s APIs individually, she only needs to use one single Searchlight web interface to perform all the queries. Currently, Searchlight supports indexing OpenStack services such as Cinder, Designate, Glance, Ironic, Neutron, Nova, and Swift. Searchlight also provides a context menu for quick operations on resource search results, e.g., creating an instance from an image.
• Cloud resource repository: because Searchlight keeps records of real-time notification data from other OpenStack’s components, it is aware of the committed, available cloud resources, and other operational events. This capacity of Searchlight can be leveraged by virtual infrastructure management (VIM) applications, e.g., self-healing, self-configuration, RCA, etc. This is a work-in-progress [1].
• Multi-cloud discovery: Searchlight resource repositories can be connected forming a distributed resource discovery infrastructure across multi-cloud deployment, i.e., cross OpenStack domain, OpenStack-Azure, AWS, or Containers on OpenStack VMs. This new role of Searchlight can take advantages of the existing user-friendly interface for multi-cloud resource administrators [2] while also providing a unified API for the automation of the resource management operation.