Nova is the underlying cloud 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. It manages all the compute resources, networking, authorization, and scalability needs of the OpenStack cloud. Nova is a management platform and does not provide any virtualization capabilities by itself; instead, it uses libvirt APIs to interact with the supported hypervisors. Nova exposes its capabilities through a web services API that is compatible with that of EC2 of Amazon Web Services.
