OpenStack Cloud open source software provides a powerful, versatile platform for building Infrastructure as a Service. With components that automate deployment and integration lifecycle for compute, networking, object storage, image management, and identity/authentication, OpenStack gives cloud operators a rich set of interfaces for controlling and automating a massively scalable fabric of virtualized IaaS resources. Building on a brief introduction of the problems OpenStack was designed to solve, this session explores how the components of the Nova compute infrastructure work together with platform services such as mysql and rabbitmq. We'll illustrate key components of the OpenStack Cloud architecture by traversing the request flow of provisioning a VM.