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Glare

Glare is an OpenStack (cloud infrastructure) artifact repository and metadata catalog service for storing, indexing, and managing arbitrary artifacts such as images, templates, and application packages.

  • Repository and catalog for arbitrary artifacts with custom metadata (artifact management)
  • Supports pluggable artifact types and type definitions for domain-specific assets (extensibility)
  • Provides RESTful APIs for creating, updating, querying, and deleting artifacts and their metadata (API-based content management)
  • Integrates with OpenStack authentication and policy mechanisms for access control on artifacts (identity and access management)
  • Enables indexing and search over artifact metadata for discovery and reuse across OpenStack services (content discovery)

More About Glare

Glare is an OpenStack (cloud infrastructure) service that provides a generic artifact repository and metadata catalog for storing and managing structured digital assets used by cloud platforms. It focuses on artifacts that do not fit cleanly into more specialized services, such as Virtual Machine (VM) images or block storage, and instead offers a generic, type-driven model for templates, application packages, configuration assets, and other reusable components.

At its core, Glare implements a type-aware artifact management system (artifact management) in which each artifact type is defined by a schema describing its properties, metadata fields, and relationships. Artifact types are pluggable, allowing operators or service developers to introduce custom types for specific workloads, such as application blueprints, Heat templates, or deployment bundles, without changing the Glare service code. This schema-driven model enables consistent validation, storage, and querying of heterogeneous artifacts through a single Application Programming Interface (API) surface.

Glare exposes a RESTful API (API-based content management) that supports operations to create, update, publish, and delete artifacts, as well as to manage associated binary blobs and metadata attributes. The service supports versioning of artifacts, lifecycle states, and visibility controls so that artifacts can be shared across projects, limited to specific tenants, or kept private. Metadata fields can be indexed for search, enabling users and automated systems to discover artifacts by attributes such as type, version, owner, or custom domain-specific fields.

The service integrates with the broader OpenStack ecosystem (cloud infrastructure integration) by using common components such as Keystone for authentication and authorization and policy-based access control. This alignment allows Glare-managed artifacts to participate in OpenStack’s multi-tenant security model, ensuring that artifact visibility and modification rights follow project and role assignments defined centrally. Other OpenStack services or external systems can reference Glare artifacts by ID and type, making Glare a shared catalog for reusable content.

For enterprise environments, Glare can function as a central repository for deployment descriptors, orchestration templates, application images, and other composite artifacts that are needed by automation and platform services. Its type-system and schema definitions provide structure for governance and compliance, as administrators can standardize artifact formats and enforce validation rules. In directory or taxonomy terms, Glare fits under artifact repository and metadata catalog services within cloud-native platform infrastructure, with a focus on programmable, API-driven management of heterogeneous artifacts used by OpenStack-based clouds.