A few notes I am making for myself here, on the concepts of OpenStack. Note that this is more of a conciseness stream for me, and may not be 100% accurate!

• Projects are the main organizational unit in OpenStack, so it seems. Basically, depending on how you are structuring your organization, these could be viewed as the same as customers (which makes the most sense to me coming from a hosting background). They are also known as tenants or accounts.

I’m assuming that projects can have a lot of their own exclusive resources, such as images. This is probably a good thing to keep in mind when you are putting up images and other resources that you want to have available across all projects (ie: use the widgets in Admin->System to make these resources global).

When you set up using packstack (as seen here: https://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart), you get the default projects below, which can be viewed under Identity -> Projects:

You may want to cull some of these (ie: the demo one), after setting up. Note that the service tenant is required for service operation and should not be removed, and you may wish to leave the admin tenant the way it is, at least until you are comfortable that you will not need to stash any resources in it.

More info on working with projects here: http://docs.openstack.org/user-guide-admin/content/dashboard_manage_projects_users.html