Heat is a major project of OpenStack that is focused on orchestration and autoscaling. It allows deployment of complex cloud applications by defining them in text files, which it calls templates. The Heat engine parses and processes these templates. Heat understands the template format used by AWS CloudFormation, while there is a native Heat template format called HOT. The compatibility with AWS CloudFormation template system makes it possible to use several existing the AWS CloudFormation templates to be used with OpenStack.
A great advantage of orchestration is the ability of treating hardware infrastructure as code and providing features for autoscalability.
The source code for infrastructure can also be checked into version control as it can be done for software programs. Use of the YAML markup for templates makes this easy; therefore, HOT templates use YAML instead of JSON.
There are two types of APIs currently being supported by Heat; they are:
The OpenStack native REST API...