OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) documentation

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What is Cinder?

Cinder is the OpenStack Block Storage service for providing volumes to Novavirtual machines, Ironic bare metal hosts, containers and more. Some of thegoals of Cinder are to be/have:

  • Component based architecture: Quickly add new behaviors

  • Highly available: Scale to very serious workloads

  • Fault-Tolerant: Isolated processes avoid cascading failures

  • Recoverable: Failures should be easy to diagnose, debug, and rectify

  • Open Standards: Be a reference implementation for a community-driven api

For end users

As an end user of Cinder, you’ll use Cinder to create and manage volumes usingthe Horizon user interface, command line tools such as thepython-cinderclient,or by directly using theREST API.

Tools for using Cinder

  • Horizon:The official web UI for the OpenStack Project.

  • OpenStack Client:The official CLI for OpenStack Projects. You should use this as your CLI formost things, it includes not just nova commands but also commands for most ofthe projects in OpenStack.

  • Cinder Client:Theopenstack CLI is recommended, but there are some advanced featuresand administrative commands that are not yet available there. For CLI accessto these commands, thecinder CLI can be used instead.

Using the Cinder API

All features of Cinder are exposed via a REST API that can be used to buildmore complicated logic or automation with Cinder. This can be consumed directlyor via various SDKs. The following resources can help you get started consumingthe API directly.

For operators

This section has details for deploying and maintaining Cinder services.

Installing Cinder

Cinder can be configured standalone using the configuration settingauth_strategy=noauth, but in most cases you will want to at least havetheKeystone Identityservice and otherOpenStack services installed.

Administrating Cinder

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Reference

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Additional resources

For contributors

Contributions to Cinder are welcome. There can be a lot of backgroundinformation needed to get started. This section should help get you started.Please feel free to also ask any questions in the#openstack-cinder IRCchannel.

Contributing to Cinder

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For reviewers

Additional reference

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Indices and tables

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