diff --git a/doc/source/architecture.rst b/doc/source/architecture.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..771d13d97e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/source/architecture.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,75 @@
+..
+      Copyright 2010 OpenStack, LLC
+      All Rights Reserved.
+
+      Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may
+      not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain
+      a copy of the License at
+
+          http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+
+      Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+      distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT
+      WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
+      License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations
+      under the License.
+
+Glance Architecture
+===================
+
+Glance is designed to be as adaptable as possible for various back-end storage
+and registry database solutions. There is a main Glance API server
+(the ``glance-api`` program) that serves as the communications hub between
+various client programs, the registry of image metadata, and the storage
+systems that actually contain the virtual machine image data.
+
+From a birdseye perspective, one can visualize the Glance architectural model
+like so:
+
+.. graphviz::
+
+  digraph birdseye {
+    node [fontsize=10 fontname="Monospace"]
+    a [label="Client A"]
+    b [label="Client B"]
+    c [label="Client C"]
+    d [label="Glance API Server"]
+    e [label="Registry Server"]
+    f [label="Store Adapter"]
+    g [label="S3 Store"]
+    h [label="Swift Store"]
+    i [label="Filesystem Store"]
+    j [label="HTTP Store"]
+    a -> d [dir=both]
+    b -> d [dir=both]
+    c -> d [dir=both]
+    d -> e [dir=both]
+    d -> f [dir=both]
+    f -> g [dir=both]
+    f -> h [dir=both]
+    f -> i [dir=both]
+    f -> j [dir=both]
+
+  }
+
+What is a Registry Server?
+==========================
+
+A registry server is any service that publishes image metadata that conforms
+to the Glance Registry REST-ful API. Glance comes with a reference
+implementation of a registry server called ``glance-registry``, but this is
+only a reference implementation that uses a SQL database for its metdata
+storage.
+
+What is a Store?
+================
+
+A store is a Python class that inherits from ``glance.store.Backend`` and
+conforms to that class' API for reading, writing, and deleting virtual
+machine image data.
+
+Glance currently ships with stores for S3, Swift, a simple filesystem store,
+and a read-only HTTP(S) store.
+
+Implementors are encouraged to create stores for other backends, including
+other distributed storage systems like Sheepdog or Ceph.
diff --git a/doc/source/client.rst b/doc/source/client.rst
index 97ae0feaf5..9a4182cb94 100644
--- a/doc/source/client.rst
+++ b/doc/source/client.rst
@@ -36,7 +36,9 @@ Requesting a List of Public VM Images
 We want to see a list of available virtual machine images that the Glance
 server knows about.
 
-Using Glance's Client, we can do this using the following code::
+Using Glance's Client, we can do this using the following code
+
+.. code-block:: python
 
   from glance.client import Client
 
@@ -51,7 +53,9 @@ Requesting Detailed Metadata on Public VM Images
 We want to see more detailed information on available virtual machine images
 that the Glance server knows about.
 
-Using Glance's Client, we can do this using the following code::
+Using Glance's Client, we can do this using the following code
+
+.. code-block:: python
 
   from glance.client import Client
 
@@ -72,7 +76,9 @@ data returned includes the `uri` field for each available image. This
 for a specific image.
 
 Continuing the example from above, in order to get metadata about the
-first public image returned, we can use the following code::
+first public image returned, we can use the following code
+
+.. code-block:: python
 
   from glance.client import Client
 
@@ -93,7 +99,9 @@ data returned includes the `uri` field for each available image. This
 for a specific image.
 
 Continuing the example from above, in order to get both the metadata about the
-first public image returned and its image data, we can use the following code::
+first public image returned and its image data, we can use the following code
+
+.. code-block:: python
 
   from glance.client import Client
 
@@ -222,7 +230,9 @@ The list of metadata that `image_meta` can contain are listed below.
   set to the value `queued`.
 
 As a complete example, the following code would add a new machine image to
-Glance::
+Glance
+
+.. code-block:: python
 
   from glance.client import Client
 
diff --git a/doc/source/conf.py b/doc/source/conf.py
index 89e7172f81..fa7b200fac 100644
--- a/doc/source/conf.py
+++ b/doc/source/conf.py
@@ -47,6 +47,7 @@ extensions = ['sphinx.ext.autodoc',
               'sphinx.ext.ifconfig',
               'sphinx.ext.intersphinx',
               'sphinx.ext.pngmath',
+              'sphinx.ext.graphviz',
               'sphinx.ext.todo']
 
 todo_include_todos = True
diff --git a/doc/source/index.rst b/doc/source/index.rst
index 6716452c24..ac55c9b788 100644
--- a/doc/source/index.rst
+++ b/doc/source/index.rst
@@ -67,6 +67,7 @@ Developer Docs
 .. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1
 
+   architecture
    community
 
 Outstanding Documentation Tasks