Kolla

• Containerized OpenStack services using Docker images (cloud infrastructure management)
• Production-ready OpenStack deployment and operation tooling (deployment automation)
• Configuration management for OpenStack services via Ansible-based workflows (configuration management)
• Support for different deployment topologies and environments for OpenStack clouds (infrastructure architecture)
• Integration with the OpenInfra ecosystem as part of the OpenStack project family (cloud platform ecosystem)

More About Kolla

Kolla is an OpenStack project that focuses on delivering OpenStack services as Docker containers, along with tooling to deploy, manage, and upgrade these services in a consistent and automated way (cloud infrastructure management). It addresses the operational problem of installing and maintaining OpenStack control plane and supporting components across varied environments, providing a standardized container-based approach instead of package-based or custom deployments.

The project builds and maintains Docker images for core OpenStack services and related infrastructure components (containerized infrastructure). These images are designed for production use and follow OpenStack release cycles. Kolla works together with Kolla Ansible, which provides Ansible playbooks and roles to deploy and operate these images across one or more hosts (deployment automation). Through this model, Kolla supports activities such as initial deployment, configuration updates, rolling upgrades, and service restarts using repeatable, scriptable procedures.

Kolla’s architecture relies on Docker as the container runtime and uses Ansible as the orchestration and configuration mechanism (infrastructure automation). Operators describe their desired configuration in configuration files and inventories, and Kolla Ansible applies that configuration to deploy containers for components such as Application Programming Interface (API) services, schedulers, databases, message queues, and other OpenStack control plane elements. This approach separates service configuration from the host Operating System (OS) and simplifies lifecycle operations like patching or redeploying containers while preserving persistent data.

In enterprise and institutional environments, Kolla is used to stand up private or public OpenStack clouds on bare metal or virtualized servers, often integrating with tools that manage networking, storage, and hardware provisioning (private cloud infrastructure). Organizations adopt Kolla when they want to standardize on containerized control plane services while continuing to present standard OpenStack APIs to consumers. Because Kolla is part of the OpenStack and OpenInfra ecosystem, it aligns with OpenStack releases and interoperability patterns, allowing operators to use other OpenStack projects for compute, storage, and networking while relying on Kolla for deployment.

From a categorization perspective, Kolla fits into container-based OpenStack deployment and lifecycle management (cloud infrastructure management, deployment automation). It provides a structured way for platform and operations teams to manage OpenStack services as containers, using widely adopted technologies such as Docker and Ansible, while following the release practices and governance of the OpenInfra Foundation’s OpenStack project.