Skip to main content

Solum

Solum is an OpenStack project that provides application

lifecycle management and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) style orchestration on OpenStack infrastructure for developers and operators.

  • Application lifecycle management and orchestration on OpenStack (application platform management)
  • Build, deploy, and manage applications using declarative language templates (deployment automation)
  • Integration with core OpenStack services such as Compute, Image, and Orchestration (cloud infrastructure integration)
  • Support for multiple language packs to define application runtimes and frameworks (runtime environment management)
  • API-driven control plane for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) workflows and external tooling integration (DevOps and CI/CD enablement)

More About Solum

Solum is an application lifecycle management project within the OpenStack ecosystem that targets PaaS use cases on top of OpenStack infrastructure. It aims to provide a consistent way for developers and operators to define, build, deploy, scale, and update applications while relying on OpenStack services for compute, storage, and orchestration. Instead of managing infrastructure details directly, users interact with Solum’s abstractions to describe application components and their lifecycle policies.

At its core, Solum offers (application platform management) capabilities that include modeling applications, configuring build and deployment workflows, and managing updates across environments. Users typically describe applications using declarative templates and artifacts that specify source code locations, language runtimes, configuration, and deployment parameters. Solum interprets these descriptors to coordinate image creation, provisioning, and orchestration processes across an OpenStack cloud.

Solum integrates with other OpenStack projects for infrastructure operations (cloud infrastructure integration). Common integrations include using OpenStack Compute for instance provisioning, Image services for storing and managing application images, and Orchestration services to define and execute infrastructure templates. Through these integrations, Solum provides application-centric workflows that sit above base infrastructure, while still remaining aligned with OpenStack APIs and resource models.

A central feature of Solum is its use of language packs (runtime environment management). Language packs define runtime environments, frameworks, and tooling required to build and run applications written in particular programming languages or using specific platforms. By separating application source code from the language pack, Solum enables reuse of runtime definitions and supports multiple application stacks. This model allows operators to standardize supported runtimes while giving developers a consistent interface for deployment.

Solum exposes its capabilities through Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and command-line tooling (DevOps and CI/CD enablement). These interfaces enable integration with Continuous Integration (CI) and continuous delivery pipelines, source code repositories, and external automation tools. Enterprises can incorporate Solum into workflows where application changes trigger automated builds, image generation, and deployments into OpenStack-based environments, with Solum coordinating the lifecycle steps.

From an architectural perspective, Solum operates as an orchestration and control layer above core OpenStack services (application orchestration). It maintains metadata about applications, plans, and assemblies, and it orchestrates tasks such as building images, provisioning resources, and managing updates. This positioning places Solum in the category of application platform and lifecycle management tools for OpenStack, oriented toward organizations that want PaaS-like capabilities while retaining control of the underlying cloud infrastructure.