Since the Liberty release, the OpenStack community recognises the integration of a new storage project in its ecosystem–shared file service code named Manila.
It adds a complementary storage offer to the existing facilities by allowing simultaneous access to a shared-file based storage for different clients, including compute instances. Unlike Swift, Cinder, or Ceph, Manila sits on top of the basic core services of OpenStack. It is considered as a storage backend agnostic, so it can use different storage backends, as we have explored in Cinder. Manila supports several sharing protocols including NFS, CIFS, CephFS, GlusterFS, and HDFS. Bear in mind that the storage backends use drivers to serve shares and should use one of the mentioned protocols.