OpenStack has several shared services that span the three pillars of compute, storage and networking, making it easier to implement and operate your cloud. These services — including identity, image management and a web interface — integrate the OpenStack components with each other as well as external systems to provide a unified experience for users as they interact with different cloud resources.

OpenStack Identity Service

OpenStack Identity provides a central directory of users mapped to the OpenStack services they can access. It acts as a common authentication system across the cloud operating system and can integrate with existing backend directory services like LDAP. It supports multiple forms of authentication including standard username and password credentials, token-based systems and AWS-style logins.

OpenStack Image Service

The OpenStack Image Service provides discovery, registration and delivery services for disk and server images. The ability to copy or snapshot a server image and immediately store it away is a powerful capability of the OpenStack cloud operating system. Stored images can be used as a template to get new servers up and running quickly and more consistently if you are provisioning multiple servers than installing a server operating system and individually configuring additional services. It can also be used to store and catalog an unlimited number of backups.

The Image Service can store disk and server images in a variety of back-ends, including OpenStack Object Storage.  The Image Service API provides a standard REST interface for querying information about disk images and lets clients stream the images to new servers.