Welcome to Glance’s documentation!

The Glance project provides services for 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.

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.

Concepts

• Image Identifiers
• Image Statuses
• Disk and Container Formats
• Common Image Properties

Installing/Configuring Glance

• Installation
• Basic Configuration
• Authentication With Keystone
• Policies

Operating Glance

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

Using Glance

• Using Glance’s Public APIs
• Using Glance’s Client Tools