title: Components

## Components ##

Libcloud is composed of multiple components, currently those are:

* [Compute](/docs/compute-overview.html) - libcloud.compute.*
* [Storage](/docs/storage-overview.html) - libcloud.storage.*
* [Load balancers](/docs/load-balancer-overview.html) - libcloud.loadbalancer.*
* [DNS](/docs/dns-overview.html) - libcloud.dns.*

Each component is relatively self-sustainable and exposes a simple and easy
to use base API which works across all the supported providers.

In places where it makes sense a component is also aware of other components.
Good example of this is a `balancer_attach_node` method in the load balancer
API. This method takes `Node` object from the compute API as an argument
and automatically reads its first public IP address before adding a member
to the load balancer.

Besides the Base API some drivers also implement driver-specific or so called
extension methods and arguments. Those methods implement functionality which
is specific to a provider or a subset of providers. They can be easily recognized
because they are prefixed with an `ex_`.