Open Stack

On 2/24/2015 6:47 PM, Kevin Benton wrote:

> More seriously, have you considered starting a tap-as-a-service project on
> stackforge now that the services split has established a framework for
> advanced services? Uploading the code you are using to do it is a great way
> to get people motivated to try it, propose new features, critique it, etc.
> If you can't upload it because your approach would be proprietary, then
> would upstream support even be relevant?
>

Right now we haven't written any code, but my concern is really more 
about standardizing the API. We're currently weighing two categories of 
options. One is to evaluate a number of open and closed source SDN 
software as plugins to Neutron. I'm not going to list names, but the 
candidates are represented in the plugins and ml2 subdirectories of 
Neutron. Many of these provide tap/mirror functionality, but since 
there's no standard Neutron API they we would be coding to a vendor 
specific API and have to call multiple different APIs to do the same 
thing if we deploy different ones in different locations over time.

The other option that we've considered is to extend a piece of software 
we've written that currently has nothing to do with tap/mirror but does 
perform some OvS flow modifications. If we went with this route we 
certainly would consider open sourcing it, but right now this is the 
less likely plan B.

It actually doesn't matter to me very much whether Neutron implements 
the tap functionality, but I'd really like to see a standard API call 
that the various SDN vendors could get behind. Right now it's possible 
to make Neutron API calls to manipulate networks, ports, and subnets and 
expect that they will function essentially the same way regardless of 
the underlying implementation from a variety of hardware and software 
vendors. But if we want to mirror a vSwitch port to an analyzer we have 
a myriad of vendor specific API calls that are entirely dependent on the 
underlying software and/or hardware beneath Neutron.