OpenStack Image Service

OpenStack Image Service (code-named Glance) provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for virtual disk images. The Image Service API server provides a standard REST interface for querying information about virtual disk images stored in a variety of back-end stores, including OpenStack Object Storage. Clients can register new virtual disk images with the Image Service, query for information on publicly available disk images, and use the Image Service's client library for streaming virtual disk images.

A multi-format image registry, OpenStack Image Service allows uploads of private and public images in a variety of formats, including:

• Raw
• Machine (kernel/ramdisk outside of image, a.k.a. AMI)
• VHD (Hyper-V)
• VDI (VirtualBox)
• qcow2 (Qemu/KVM)
• VMDK (VMWare)
• OVF (VMWare, others)

Popular Use Cases

• Service providers offering an IaaS virtual machine image registry
• Enterprises creating a low cost DR/BCP platform to backup their virtual server images
• ISVs offering pre-configured optimized images of their software