How-To

How to use OpenStack Glance Image Import

Erno Kuvaja and Brian Rosmaita walk you through the update.

November 24, 2017
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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. 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.

The long-awaited Image Import Refactor was delivered with the Pike release. There has been “much rejoicing” say Brian Rosmaita (current project team lead, PTL, for the project) and Erno Kuvaja (senior software engineer at Red Hat and Glance core) who recently spoke about it at the OpenStack Summit Sydney. (More on updates to Glance here.)

It replaces the Image Upload and has been years in the making, Kuvaja says. For now, it’s a minimal viable product that enables development for a lot of popular use cases and sets the stage for more to come in Queens. In the 40-minute talk, they walk you through what’s currently available and what you can do to help get the features that will be most useful to you into the next releases.

Glance Image Import was carefully designed with community input from many people and many OpenStack projects to be interoperable and discoverable. The pair explain exactly what that means, why it’s so important and what it means for you as a cloud operator, cloud administrator or cloud user.

“In some small clouds, you might not care what users upload and if something happens you can go find them in their office if they do something bad,” Rosmaita says. “But as clouds get larger, you have different requirements and you may have different levels of trust for your users. The challenge was to come up with an interoperable way to be flexible with how stuff gets into your cloud but make it regimented enough that it’s interoperable between different Openstack clouds.”

This single API workflow which lets operators and tooling developers define and users choose a way they want to upload image data makes uploads more performant. Check out the whole talk below and download the slides here.

 

Cover Photo // CC BY NC

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