Comment by jgalvin for You can use swift as a backend for Glance. This would put the base of your VM in object storage, but it would not allow persitent storage for the VM, only ephemeral. If you want block storage based in object storage, look into ceph. Depending on who you ask, ceph is better than Swift since it has block AND object storage on the same backend (and a POSIX fs that is not production ready yet). Ceph has a full cinder driver and works extremly well. You can even use Ceph in place of Swift for an object storage endpoint for openstack, though it will not work as well as Swift in this regard. To enable swift as Glance backend, enable glance-api.conf config with the following: default_store = swift swift_store_create_container_on_put = True swift_store_auth_address = http://keystoneurl:keystoneport/v2.0/ swift_store_user = glance:glance swift_store_key = galnceswiftpassword Make sure to adjust those urls and credentials to match your enviroment.

Thanks for the response and answering my question much appreciated, Im new to openstack and cant see anywhere in the documentation that shows me how I can add swift as the backend for glance Is it possible you can walk me through this or point me to the right documentation ? I cant see in the following link when installing glance how i can point it to swift : http://docs.openstack.org/havana/install-guide/install/yum/content/glance-install.html Thanks again for your help