OpenStack Series: Part 9 – Horizon – a web based UI Service

Introduction
Horizon is the canonical implementation of OpenStack’s Dashboard, which provides a web based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, etc.

This project is a bit different from other OpenStack projects in that it has two very distinct components underneath it: horizon, and openstack_dashboard.

• The horizon directory holds the generic libraries and components that can be used in any Django project.
• The openstack_dashboard directory contains a reference Django project that uses horizon.

Note: Dashboard is defined in Wikipedia as "an easy to read, often single page, real-time user interface, showing a graphical presentation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organization’s key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."

In this post we are going to look mainly the OpenStack Dashboard.

Horizon API Reference
A look a the API can give us a better understanding of the capability of what the OpenStack dashboard can provide.  In Juno release OpenStack Dashboard added the following capabilities:

• Ability to deploy Apache Hadoop clusters in seconds, giving users the ability to rapidly scale data sets based on a set of custom parameters. 
• Additional improvements include extending the RBAC system to support OpenStack projects Compute, Networking, and Orchestration

Below is a list of In-depth documentation for Horizon and its APIs I found in the OpenStack documentation:

• The run_tests.sh Script
• The horizon Module
• Horizon Workflows
• Horizon DataTables
• Horizon Tabs and TabGroups
• Horizon Forms
• Horizon Middleware
• Horizon Context Processors
• Horizon Decorators
• Horizon Exceptions
• Horizon TestCase Classes
• local.conf

OpenStack Dashboard
This site has a good description on OpenStack Dashboard - The OpenStack dashboard provides administrators and users a graphical interface to access, provision and automate cloud-based resources.


Dashboard Capabilities

• The dashboard is an extensible web app that allows cloud administrators and users to control their compute, storage and networking resources.
• As a cloud administrator, the dashboard provides an overall view of the size and state of your cloud. You can create users and projects, assign users to projects and set limits on the resources for those projects.
• The dashboard provides users a self-service portal to provision their own resources within the limits set by administrators.

Related Post:
OpenStack Series Part 1: How do you look at OpenStack?
OpenStack Series Part 2: What's new in the Juno Release?
OpenStack Series Part 3: Keystone - Identity Service
OpenStack Series Part 4: Nova - Compute Service
OpenStack Series Part 5: Glance - Image Service
OpenStack Series Part 6: Cinder - Block Storage Service
OpenStack Series Part 7: Swift - Object Storage Service
OpenStack Series Part 8: Neutron - Networking Service
OpenStack Series Part 10: Heat - Orchestration Service
OpenStack Series Part 11: Ceilometer - Monitoring and Metering Service
OpenStack Series Part 12: Trove - Database Service
OpenStack Series Part 13: Docker in OpenStack
OpenStack Series Part 14: Sahara - Data Processing Service
OpenStack Series part 15: Messaging and Queuing System in OpenStack
OpenStack Series Part 16: Ceph in OpenStack
OpenStack Series Part 17: Congress - Policy Service
OpenStack Series Part 18: Network Function Virtualization in OpenStack
OpenStack Series Part 19: Storage Polices for Object Storage
OpenStack Series Part 20: Group-based Policy for Neutron
Reference:
"OpenStack Dashboard." » OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
"OpenStack." Horizon: The Dashboard Project — Horizon 2015.1.dev265.g6ce23e6 Documentation. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.
"OpenStack Juno." Latest Release » OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2014.