What is Cinder?
Cinder is an open-source block storage platform designed to provide persistent block storage for OpenStack cloud computing environments. As a core OpenStack project, Cinder integrates with OpenStack compute and networking services to provide expanded storage capabilities for virtual machines running in an OpenStack deployment.
Some key capabilities and features of Cinder include:
- Creation and management of block storage volumes and volume snapshots
- Storage quota enforcement on a per-project and per-user basis
- Supports plugins for integration with various storage platforms and protocols (iSCSI, Ceph, NetApp, etc.)
- APIs for integration with OpenStack services like Nova, Glance, and Horizon
- Provides high availability storage with configurable replication
- Thin provisioning to optimize capacity utilization
- Storage QoS limits like volume type and throughput
As an OpenStack core component, Cinder handles persistent block storage services like volume, backup, and snapshot management to augment the ephemeral storage capabilities native to compute instances. Its modular plugin-based architecture allows it to connect to a variety of external storage platforms to enable scalable and resilient storage for cloud-based workloads.