I gave an introductory “WTF is OpenStack” talk at the OpenStack miniconf at PyCon-AU this morning. For the uninitiated, this eventually boiled down to defining OpenStack as:

A framework that allows you to efficiently and dynamically manage virtualization and storage, so your users can request computing power and disk space as they need it.

It was suggested, given recent developments, that I might change this to:

A framework that allows you to efficiently and dynamically manage ALL THE THINGS!

Leaving that aside for the moment though, several people pointed out that my state transition diagram serves to very clearly elucidate how the various pieces of OpenStack interact when someone wants to deploy a VM. Here is is for posterity:

There’s also an etherpad covering the day’s talks at https://etherpad.openstack.org/pyconau-os-hack. Note that the images in the above diagram (aside from the hand-drawn Tim) are courtesy of Martin Loschwitz.