Blazar

Blazar is an OpenStack resource reservation service that provides advance booking and leasing of cloud resources such as compute hosts and networks for time-bound use in OpenStack-based environments (infrastructure management).

• Advance reservation and leasing of OpenStack resources (infrastructure management)
• Time-based scheduling of compute hosts and other resource types (resource scheduling)
• Integration with OpenStack services such as Nova and Keystone for resource and identity management (cloud infrastructure)
• APIs for creating, updating, and canceling reservations and leases (infrastructure automation)
• Support for policies around capacity allocation and resource availability windows (resource governance)

More About Blazar

Blazar is an OpenStack project that addresses the need for advance reservation and time-based allocation of cloud infrastructure resources (infrastructure management). In multi-tenant OpenStack clouds, users and operators often require resources to be available at specific times and for defined durations. Blazar provides a framework for resource leasing so that compute hosts, and other supported resource types, can be reserved ahead of time, used during the lease period, and then released back to the general pool.

At its core, Blazar offers a service for creating and managing leases (infrastructure automation). A lease represents a contract over a time interval during which specified resources are allocated to a tenant. Through Blazar APIs, users can create leases with start and end dates, list and inspect existing leases, modify certain attributes, or cancel leases. Blazar coordinates with OpenStack services, primarily Nova for compute resources, to enforce these reservations so that capacity is available when the lease becomes active.

The project integrates with Keystone for authentication and multi-tenant isolation (identity and access), aligning with the overall OpenStack architecture. Blazar follows the typical OpenStack pattern of a service Application Programming Interface (API), a manager or controller component, and resource-specific plugins or drivers (cloud infrastructure). Resource plugins allow Blazar to manage different types of resources, with host reservations for Nova compute nodes as a central capability. The service maintains state about leases, reservations, and allocation, and applies scheduling logic to match requests to available capacity over time (resource scheduling).

In enterprise and institutional environments, Blazar is used in private and hosted OpenStack clouds where teams need guaranteed access to resources for activities such as testing windows, training events, workshops, or scheduled workloads (infrastructure management). Operators can reserve dedicated compute hosts for particular projects or users, ensuring predictable capacity and avoiding contention during critical periods. Time-based reservations also support planning of maintenance windows and controlled allocation of scarce resources.

Blazar exposes Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs that can be integrated into higher-level portals, workflow engines, or custom automation tools (integration and automation). This allows organizations to embed reservation workflows into self-service platforms or Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, coordinating resource availability with application deployment schedules. Because it is an OpenStack project under the Open Infrastructure Foundation, Blazar adheres to common OpenStack practices for configuration, deployment, and interoperability within the OpenStack ecosystem (cloud infrastructure).

From a directory and taxonomy perspective, Blazar fits into the category of cloud resource reservation and scheduling for OpenStack-based infrastructure (infrastructure management). It operates alongside other OpenStack services such as Nova and Keystone, providing a focused capability for time-bound resource allocation that complements general-purpose scheduling and quota mechanisms.