The OpenStack dashboard is the web interface component provided with OpenStack. You'll sometimes hear the terms dashboard and Horizon used interchangeably. Technically, they are not the same thing. This book will refer to the web interface as the dashboard. The team that develops the web interface maintains both the dashboard interface and the Horizon framework that the dashboard uses.

More important than getting these terms right is understanding the commitment that the team that maintains this code base has made to the OpenStack project. They have pledged to include support for all the officially accepted components that are included in OpenStack. Visit the OpenStack website (http://www.openstack.org/) to get an official list of OpenStack components.

The dashboard cannot do anything that the API cannot do. All the actions that are taken through the dashboard result in calls to the API to complete the task requested by the end user. Throughout this book, we will examine how to use the web interface and the API clients to execute tasks in an OpenStack cluster. Next, we will discuss both the dashboard and the underlying components that the dashboard makes calls to when creating OpenStack resources.