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OpenStack Murano

OpenStack Murano is an application catalog and application lifecycle orchestration (cloud application management) project for OpenStack clouds.

  • Application catalog service for OpenStack environments (cloud application management)
  • Templating and packaging of applications as Murano packages with metadata and dependencies (deployment automation)
  • GUI and Application Programming Interface (API) integration with Horizon and OpenStack APIs for browsing, deploying, and managing applications (cloud management interface)
  • Environment modeling and lifecycle operations such as deploy, update, and delete for complex multi-tier applications (orchestration)
  • Integration with other OpenStack services for provisioning compute, networking, and storage resources as part of application deployment (infrastructure orchestration)

More About OpenStack Murano

OpenStack Murano is an application catalog and lifecycle management project that enables users to define, package, and deploy applications on OpenStack-based clouds. It addresses the problem of delivering repeatable, model-driven application deployments on top of infrastructure services such as compute, networking, and storage, while exposing these deployments through both graphical and programmatic interfaces (cloud application management).

Murano provides an application catalog service in which applications are represented as Murano packages. These packages contain application metadata, UI definitions, templates, and deployment logic, allowing operators and developers to describe how applications should be instantiated and configured (deployment automation). The catalog supports browsing, versioning, and organizing applications so that cloud users can select predefined solutions instead of configuring resources manually.

The project integrates with Horizon, the OpenStack dashboard, to offer a graphical interface where users can discover applications, configure parameters, and launch environments (cloud management interface). In parallel, Murano exposes a Representational State Transfer (REST) API that enables automated workflows, integration with external portals, and Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Through these interfaces, Murano interacts with other OpenStack services, such as Nova for compute, Neutron for networking, and Cinder for block storage, to provision the infrastructure required by each application (infrastructure orchestration).

Murano introduces an environment model in which a deployment is represented as a collection of application components and configuration parameters (orchestration). This model supports complex, multi-tier applications and can coordinate deployment steps, configuration scripts, and dependencies between components. MuranoPL, a domain-specific language used by the project, allows authors to describe application logic and workflows, including relationships between services and resources (configuration and orchestration language).

In enterprise and institutional settings, Murano is used to build internal application marketplaces and standardized blueprints for common stacks, such as web applications, middleware platforms, and packaged solutions (cloud application catalog). This enables IT teams to expose curated application bundles while controlling underlying resource usage and configuration standards. Murano’s packaging model and environment abstraction make it applicable in hybrid-role teams where operations and development groups collaborate on repeatable deployments.

Within an OpenStack ecosystem, Murano occupies the layer above core infrastructure services, positioned alongside orchestration and management tools. It focuses on application-level constructs rather than individual virtual machines or networks, acting as a bridge between platform operators who define packages and end users who consume them. For directory and taxonomy purposes, OpenStack Murano is categorized under cloud platforms, application catalogs, and application lifecycle and deployment orchestration for OpenStack-based private and public clouds.