Nova is the Computing Fabric controller for the OpenStack Cloud. All activities needed to support the life cycle of instances within the OpenStack cloud are handled by Nova. This makes Nova a Management Platform that manages compute resources, networking, authorization, and scalability needs of the OpenStack cloud. But, Nova does not provide any virtualization capabilities by itself; instead, it uses libvirt APIs to interact with the supported hypervisors. Nova exposes all its capabilities through a web services API that is compatible with the EC2 API of Amazon Web Services.
