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Horizon (OSS Project)

Horizon is the web-based dashboard (cloud management / Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) control plane UI) for OpenStack, providing a graphical interface to OpenStack services for administrators and end users.

  • Web-based dashboard for managing OpenStack projects, users, and resources (cloud management)
  • GUI for provisioning and managing compute instances, storage volumes, and networking resources (IaaS management)
  • Integration point for multiple OpenStack services through a pluggable panel and dashboard framework (platform integration)
  • Role-based access to cloud resources aligned with OpenStack Identity (identity and access management)
  • Extensible UI framework that operators and vendors can customize and extend with additional panels and workflows (UI extensibility)

More About Horizon (OSS Project)

Horizon is the official web-based dashboard for OpenStack (cloud infrastructure), designed to provide a graphical user interface for managing and operating OpenStack-based clouds. It addresses the need for a centralized, browser-accessible control surface that exposes OpenStack APIs through forms, tables, and guided workflows for both administrators and end users. Instead of interacting exclusively through command-line tools or direct Application Programming Interface (API) calls, operators can use Horizon to perform routine cloud management tasks through a web UI.

The project focuses on user interaction with OpenStack services (cloud management), including compute, networking, and storage. Through configurable dashboards and panels, Horizon provides views and actions for instances, images, key pairs, security groups, volumes, volume snapshots, networks, routers, and load balancers, depending on which OpenStack services are enabled in a deployment. It interfaces with core OpenStack components via their public APIs, such as services for compute, block storage, image management, networking, and identity, aligning its capabilities with the deployed OpenStack environment.

Horizon includes an extensible dashboard framework (UI extensibility) implemented in Django, with a pluggable architecture that allows operators and vendors to add, remove, or modify dashboards and panels. This framework supports custom workflows, tables, and forms, enabling integration of additional OpenStack services or site-specific tools into a unified console. Configuration options cover settings for API endpoints, policy, user interface behavior, theming, and branding, giving enterprises control over how the dashboard appears and which capabilities are exposed.

In enterprise and institutional environments, Horizon is typically deployed as part of an OpenStack control plane (cloud platform operations). Administrators use it to manage projects (tenants), users, quotas, and roles, and to monitor and adjust cloud resources. Project users access Horizon to create and manage their own resources within assigned quotas, such as launching instances, attaching volumes, configuring networks, and managing access credentials. The dashboard respects OpenStack Identity (identity and access management) policies and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), so available operations and visible data are filtered according to user roles and domain or project scope.

From an architectural perspective, Horizon functions as a stateless web application that communicates with OpenStack services through their Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs (API client). It relies on the OpenStack Identity service for authentication and token management and uses service catalogs to discover API endpoints. Operators can deploy Horizon behind load balancers and integrate it with Transport Layer Security (TLS) termination, enterprise authentication mechanisms supported by the underlying identity backend, and existing monitoring and logging stacks.

Within an OpenStack ecosystem, Horizon occupies the dashboard and operations console category (cloud management UI). It serves as a central point where cloud operators and tenants interact with OpenStack services without direct use of Command-Line Interface (CLI) tools, while still enforcing policy and access control defined at the identity and policy levels. Its extensibility and alignment with OpenStack APIs position it as a configurable interface layer that enterprises can adapt to their specific operational workflows and governance requirements.