OpenStack Interview Questions and Answers
Intermediate / 1 to 5 years experienced level questions & answers
Ques 1. What is OpenStack?
OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing platform that provides a set of services for building and managing public and private clouds.
Ques 2. Explain the main components of OpenStack.
The main components of OpenStack include Nova (compute), Swift (object storage), Cinder (block storage), Neutron (networking), Keystone (identity), Glance (image service), and Horizon (dashboard).
Ques 3. What is Nova in OpenStack?
Nova is the compute service in OpenStack, responsible for managing and orchestrating virtual machines (VMs) on the cloud infrastructure.
Ques 4. Describe the role of Neutron in OpenStack.
Neutron is the networking service in OpenStack, providing networking capabilities such as creating and managing network resources, subnets, and routers.
Ques 5. How does Keystone handle authentication in OpenStack?
Keystone is the identity service in OpenStack, responsible for authentication and authorization. It provides a token-based authentication system.
Ques 6. Explain the purpose of Glance in OpenStack.
Glance is the image service in OpenStack, allowing users to discover, register, and retrieve virtual machine images.
Ques 7. What is Cinder in OpenStack?
Cinder is the block storage service in OpenStack, providing persistent block storage to VMs. It allows users to attach and detach volumes to and from instances.
Ques 8. How does Swift handle object storage in OpenStack?
Swift is the object storage service in OpenStack, designed for scalability and durability. It stores and retrieves unstructured data through a RESTful API.
Ques 9. What is Horizon in OpenStack?
Horizon is the web-based dashboard interface for OpenStack, allowing users to interact with and manage the various OpenStack services through a graphical user interface.
Ques 10. What is the role of Heat in OpenStack?
Heat is the orchestration service in OpenStack, allowing users to describe and automate the deployment of infrastructure resources as a code through templates.
Ques 11. Explain the concept of 'Floating IP' in Neutron.
A Floating IP in Neutron is an external IP address that can be associated with an OpenStack instance, enabling external connectivity. It can be dynamically reassigned to different instances.
Ques 12. What is the purpose of Ceilometer in OpenStack?
Ceilometer is the telemetry and metering service in OpenStack, providing data and metrics on the usage of cloud resources. It helps in billing, monitoring, and capacity planning.
Ques 13. Explain the use of the 'snapshot' feature in Cinder.
In Cinder, a snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a volume. It allows users to create a backup or capture the state of a volume, providing data protection and recovery options.
Ques 14. What is the purpose of the Sahara project in OpenStack?
Sahara is the data processing service in OpenStack, enabling the provisioning and management of data processing frameworks, such as Apache Hadoop and Spark, on OpenStack clusters.
Ques 15. Explain the role of Zaqar in OpenStack.
Zaqar is the messaging and notification service in OpenStack, providing a scalable and multi-tenant messaging API. It allows communication between different components and services.
Ques 16. Explain the concept of 'Roles' in Keystone.
In Keystone, roles are a way to define a set of permissions or access rights. Users are assigned roles, and roles are associated with specific operations or resources in OpenStack.
Ques 17. What is the purpose of the 'OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR' extension in Nova?
The 'OS-EXT-SRV-ATTR' extension in Nova provides additional attributes and information about a server instance, including details about the host, instance name, and hypervisor.
Ques 18. Explain the concept of 'Keypair' in Nova.
A Keypair in Nova is a security feature used for secure communication with instances. It consists of a public key that is injected into the instance during its creation.
Ques 19. What is the purpose of the 'cinder-scheduler' in Cinder?
The 'cinder-scheduler' in Cinder is responsible for selecting and scheduling the appropriate storage backend for creating and managing volumes based on resource availability and policies.
Ques 20. Explain the role of the 'OS-DCF' extension in Nova.
The 'OS-DCF' extension in Nova provides information about the disk and configuration of an instance, including the disk size, and whether the instance is set to delete on termination.
Ques 21. What is the purpose of the 'Manila' project in OpenStack?
Manila is the shared file system service in OpenStack, allowing users to create and manage shared file systems that can be accessed by multiple instances simultaneously.
Ques 22. Explain the role of the 'oslo.messaging' library in OpenStack.
The 'oslo.messaging' library in OpenStack is used for inter-process communication and messaging between different OpenStack services. It provides a common messaging framework.
Ques 23. What is the purpose of the 'Placement' service in Nova?
The 'Placement' service in Nova is responsible for managing and tracking the placement of resources in the cloud, including compute resources such as CPU, memory, and disk.
Ques 24. Explain the use of the 'Trove' project in OpenStack.
Trove is the database as a service (DBaaS) project in OpenStack, providing users with the ability to manage and provision relational and non-relational database instances.
Ques 25. What is the role of the 'Rally' project in OpenStack?
Rally is the benchmarking and performance testing project in OpenStack, designed to assess and validate the performance and scalability of OpenStack deployments.
Ques 26. What is the purpose of the 'Searchlight' project in OpenStack?
Searchlight is the search and indexing service in OpenStack, providing a unified search capability across different OpenStack services and resources.
Experienced / Expert level questions & answers
Ques 27. Explain the concept of an 'Availability Zone' in Nova.
An Availability Zone in Nova represents a set of compute resources within a region. It allows users to place instances in specific zones to achieve high availability and redundancy.
Ques 28. What is the purpose of the 'swift-ring-builder' tool in Swift?
The 'swift-ring-builder' tool is used to manage the partitioning and distribution of data across the Swift object storage cluster. It helps in maintaining and updating the ring structure.
Ques 29. Explain the concept of 'Network namespaces' in Neutron.
Network namespaces in Neutron provide isolated network environments within the same host. They enable the creation of multiple virtual networks on a single physical host.
Ques 30. Explain the concept of 'CORS' in Swift.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in Swift is a mechanism that allows resources, such as object storage, to be requested from a different domain than the one that served the original resource.
Most helpful rated by users:
- What is Horizon in OpenStack?
- What is OpenStack?
- Explain the main components of OpenStack.
- What is Nova in OpenStack?
- Describe the role of Neutron in OpenStack.
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