Heat is an OpenStack project that orchestrates multiple cloud applications and their environments. It uses templates that define cloud resources and allows deploying and updating stacks of resources. Heat integrates with other OpenStack services like Nova, Glance, and Neutron and uses standards like AWS CloudFormation and TOSCA. The Heat architecture uses an API, engine, and metadata service to deploy stacks defined in templates across OpenStack. Heat also provides a command line interface and tools like Heat-jeos to build images.