OpenStack Summit May 2014 Atlanta

OpenStack networking can be challenging and many of the biggest deployments such as HP, ANL, and CERN use their own customized network drivers. That’s because default OpenStack networking models don’t make sense in a modern datacenter. We designed our own layer-3 (L3) nova-network plugins to Open Cloud System (OCS) 3.0 that replaced the default networking model in an extensible and best practices manner. By removing nova-network from the data path, we delivered a fully scale out networking model that can support 100s of racks in a single cloud with incredibly high performance. This is similar to the approach taken HP, CERN, and others.
We’ll look in detail at the network architecture, examine our “Layer-3” (L3) plugin, discuss the challenges in writing a custom network driver, and talk about how we solved the NAT and DHCP challenges.
OpenStack networking can be challenging and many of the biggest deployments such as HP, ANL, and CERN use their own customized network drivers. That’s because default OpenStack networking models don’t make sense in a modern datacenter. We designed our own layer-3 (L3) nova-network plugins to Open Cloud System (OCS) 3.0 that replaced the default networking model in an extensible and best practices manner. By removing nova-network from the data path, we delivered a fully scale out networking model that can support 100s of racks in a single cloud with incredibly high performance. This is similar to the approach taken HP, CERN, and others.
We’ll look in detail at the network architecture, examine our “Layer-3” (L3) plugin, discuss the challenges in writing a custom network driver, and talk about how we solved the NAT and DHCP challenges.