6.5. Image Service

Images can be a management headache for many installations. While using Glance along with Swift is the clear choice for larger installations, its management overhead and additional configuration complexity may be too much for smaller deployments. In these cases, nova-objectstore is probably the best alternative.

Warning:

Even if you choose Glance as your image catalog, you may still need the nova-objectstore on your machine. For emulation of the Amazon EC2 AMI uploading and bundling semantics, Nova uses the nova-objectstore as a temporary holding space for various pieces of the AMI. Only once all the pieces have arrived are they assembled and transported into Glance.