Welcome to Nova’s developer documentation!

Nova is the project name for OpenStack Compute, a cloud computing fabric controller, the main part of an IaaS system. Individuals and organizations can use Nova to host and manage their own cloud computing systems. Nova originated as a project out of NASA Ames Research Laboratory.

Nova is written with the following design guidelines in mind:

• Component based architecture: Quickly add new behaviors
• Highly available: Scale to very serious workloads
• Fault-Tolerant: Isolated processes avoid cascading failures
• Recoverable: Failures should be easy to diagnose, debug, and rectify
• Open Standards: Be a reference implementation for a community-driven api
• API Compatibility: Nova strives to provide API-compatible with popular systems like Amazon EC2

This documentation is generated by the Sphinx toolkit and lives in the source tree. Additional draft and project documentation on Nova and other components of OpenStack can be found on the OpenStack wiki. Cloud administrators, refer to docs.openstack.org.

Developer Docs

• Developer Guide
• Command-line Utilities
• Hypervisor Support Matrix

API Extensions

Go to the API Complete Reference for information about Compute API extensions.

Indices and tables

• Index
• Module Index
• Search Page