# Glossary

CLI

  Command-Line Interface; a textual user interface.

compute

  OpenStack Compute (Nova).

container

  One of the object-store resources; a container holds objects being stored.

endpoint

  A base URL used in a REST request. An authentication endpoint is specifically the URL given to a user to identify a cloud. A service endpoint is generally obtained from the service catalog.

host

  A physical computer. Contrast with node and server.

identity

  OpenStack Identity (Keystone).

image

  OpenStack Image (Glance). Also the attribute name of the disk files stored for use by servers.

keypair

  The attribute name of the SSH public key used in the OpenStack Compute API for server authentication.

node

  A logical system, may refer to a server (virtual machine) or a host.

  Generally used to describe an OS instance where a specific process is running, e.g. a ‘network node’ is where the network processes run, and may be directly on a host or in a server. Contrast with host and server.

object

  A generic term which normally refers to the a Python `object`. The OpenStack Object Store service (Swift) also uses object as the name of the item being stored within a container.

object-store

  OpenStack Object Store (Swift).

project

  The name of the owner of resources in an OpenStack cloud. A project can map to a customer, account or organization in different OpenStack deployments. Used instead of the deprecated tenant.

region

  The attribute name of a partitioning of cloud resources.

resource

  A Python object representing an OpenStack resource inside the SDK code. Also used to describe the items managed by OpenStack.

role

  A personality that a user assumes when performing a specific set of operations. A role includes a set of rights and privileges that a user assuming that role inherits. The OpenStack Identity service includes the set of roles that a user can assume in the token that is issued to that user.

  The individual services determine how the roles are interpreted and access granted to operations or resources. The OpenStack Identity service treats a role as an arbitrary name assigned by the cloud administrator.

server

  A virtual machine or a bare-metal host managed by the OpenStack Compute service. Contrast with host and node.

service

  In OpenStack this refers to a service/endpoint in the ServiceCatalog. It could also be a collection of endpoints for different regions. A service has a type and a name.

service catalog

  The list of services configured at a given authentication endpoint available to the authenticated user.

tenant

  Deprecated in favor of project.

token

  An arbitrary bit of text that is used to access resources. Some tokens are scoped to determine what resources are accessible with it. A token may be revoked at any time and is valid for a finite duration.

volume

  OpenStack Volume (Cinder). Also the attribute name of the virtual disks managed by the OpenStack Volume service.

this page last updated: 2026-01-16 23:06:19

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