Open Stack

Hi,

My name is Ivar Lazzaro, I’m an Italian developer currently employed at Embrane.


Embrane provides L3 to L7 network services, (including routing, load balancing, SSL offloads, firewalls and IPsec VPNs), and we have developed a Neutron plugin that we would like to share and contribute to Openstack[1].


My experience with OpenStack started with the Essex edition, which I deployed and managed as a "user". Embrane leverages any existing form of L2 to offer connectivity at L3 and above, and therefore our interest in contributing to OpenStack grew as L3 (and above) capabilities started to be added to Neutron, leading to the realization of a Neutron plugin.


I'd like to talk about it with you before "blindly" requesting a review, and get your feedback and advice in order to improve it at the most!


The idea is to provide L3 connectivity in Openstack through our software platform, called heleos, obviously using a plugin to follow the Neutron workflow.Since we don't provide L2 connectivity (which is part of the core APIs as well) our plugin is going to work together with one of the existing, which will manage L2 connectivity and share all the information needed.


Therefore, whenever a user chooses to use Embrane's Neutron plugin, he specifies one of the supported existing plugins in the configuration file, and L2 connectivity will be provided by that specific choice.

At the current state, for instance, our plugin is able to work with the OpenVSwitch's so that:


-create_network() will call OVS plugin;

-create_port() will call OVS plugin;

-crate_router() will call Embrane's which will use knowledge from the OVS plugin in order to provide L3 connectivity.


and so forth...

The calls can be asynchronous (using Router "status" in a way similar to the LBaaS extension).


Without going too much into details, that's all about the L3 plugin that we would like to share. We are also interested in sharing a LBaaS service plugin, but I'll do a different blueprint for that one.

All your feedback and comments are welcome :)


Thanks,

Ivar.


[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/embrane-neutron-plugin
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