The front and center of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution is the compute service that runs the Cloud application workloads. OpenStack Compute, named project Nova, is responsible for providing computing as a Service framework for OpenStack that enables provisioning and managing the life cycle of instances of virtual machines at a large scale. Nova allows us to create, manage, and destroy virtual machine instances using API calls. Nova also has a complete command-line tool interacting with the API.
Nova's architecture is designed to scale horizontally on standard hardware, which allows us to create a highly scalable Cloud environment.
To implement Compute as a Service and manage large amount of virtual machine instances that can rapidly scale out, Nova uses several Linux services that fall under the following categories: