Some notes on Glance

While Swift is the oldest OpenStack component, Glance is the newest.

• Main purpose is to store and organize Virtual Disk Images.
• Can be run as a standalone service, but, also provides a nice end-to-end solution when coupled with Swift and Nova.
• 3 parts to Glance:
• glance-api - accepts API calls and communicates with glance-registry and / or image store to query, upload, retrieve, or delete disk images.
• glance-registry - stores and retrieves metadata on the stored images in a database.  
• image store - stores the actual images - can be Swift, a shared FS (e.g. NFS), an http URL, or Amazon S3.
• Supports VDI, qcow2, ISO, Raw, VMDK, VHD, AMI, ARI, & AKI image formats.