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Nova (OSS Project)

OpenStack Nova is the compute service of OpenStack that provides scalable management of Virtual Machine (VM) and bare metal instances for cloud infrastructure (cloud infrastructure management).

  • Provisioning, scheduling, and lifecycle management of compute instances across a cloud environment (cloud infrastructure management).
  • Abstraction layer over multiple hypervisors and virtualization technologies (virtualization management).
  • Integration with other OpenStack services for networking, block storage, and identity (cloud platform integration).
  • Support for multi-tenant environments with quotas, flavors, and access controls (multi-tenant resource management).
  • API-driven control plane for programmatic automation and orchestration of compute resources (infrastructure automation).

More About Nova (OSS Project)

OpenStack Nova is the compute service within the OpenStack cloud platform and provides the core control plane for managing VM and, in some deployments, bare metal compute instances (cloud infrastructure management). It targets Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) use cases where operators need to allocate, schedule, and control compute capacity across data centers, with a consistent Application Programming Interface (API) and integration with the broader OpenStack ecosystem.

Nova exposes a RESTful API (infrastructure automation) that enables administrators, platforms, and end users to create, read, update, and delete server instances, manage metadata, and perform operations such as resize, migrate, pause, or snapshot. The service acts as an abstraction over multiple hypervisors and virtualization back ends (virtualization management), including commonly deployed hypervisor technologies listed in the Nova documentation. Through this abstraction, Nova presents a unified compute model that is decoupled from specific virtualization vendors or hardware platforms, subject to the drivers and configurations provided by the project.

Within an OpenStack deployment, Nova interacts with several other core services (cloud platform integration). It relies on OpenStack Identity service for authentication and authorization, uses the Image service to boot instances from images, and integrates with the Networking service to attach virtual networks and ports to instances. For persistent storage, Nova coordinates with the Block Storage service when instances require volumes. These interactions are handled through defined APIs and service endpoints, forming a modular architecture in which Nova serves as the central scheduler and controller for compute.

Nova includes components such as the API service, scheduler, conductor, and compute services (cloud infrastructure management). The scheduler assigns new instance requests to appropriate compute hosts based on configured filters and weighers, while the compute service on each host manages instance lifecycle operations with the local hypervisor driver. Features such as flavors, quotas, and availability zones support multi-tenant resource allocation and isolation (multi-tenant resource management), making the project usable for public, private, and hybrid cloud scenarios operated by enterprises or institutions.

Enterprises use Nova to build private or hosted IaaS environments where virtual machines are provisioned on demand, integrated with existing identity and storage systems, and automated through orchestration tools that call Nova APIs. The project’s role can be categorized as a compute control plane and resource manager for cloud data centers (cloud infrastructure management). Its interoperability with other OpenStack services and its pluggable driver model for hypervisors and external systems provide extensibility (platform extensibility) that allows operators to adapt deployments to differing hardware, network designs, and operational requirements while maintaining a common operational model for compute resources.