Open Stack

Hi,

For some time we have been discussing in the Neutron community the 
possibility of including the networking-ovn driver [1] as one of the 
in-tree Neutron drivers.  There is already a spec [2] describing in 
detail why we want to do this and why we think it is good idea.  We also 
discussed this during the PTG in Shanghai within our team [3], and had a 
discussion at the ops-meetup as well [4].

The OVN backend is free of many well-known issues which are impacting 
the existing ML2/OVS reference implementation today with the OVS agent. 
For example, OVN provides:

* Control plane performance optimizations by not using rabbitmq;
* DVR (and HA) by default, based on OpenFlow so it can be easy offloaded
   e.g. by SmartNICs;
* Distributed DHCP;

There are some feature parity gaps when comparing it to ML2/OVS that we 
plan to address.  See [2] for details.

We think that merging this code into the neutron repository will help to 
grow the networking-ovn community and will help us to keep a healthy 
Neutron team as well by increasing the number or contributors.

Our current plan is to start merging code from networking-ovn into the 
neutron repository as soon as possible in the Ussuri cycle.  But we also 
wanted to get any additional opinions from the wider community about 
this plan.  What do users and operators of Neutron think about this?

[1] https://opendev.org/openstack/networking-ovn
[2] https://review.opendev.org/#/c/658414/
[3] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/Shanghai-Neutron-Planning-restored
     Lines 252 - 295
[4] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/shanghai-ptg-ops-meetup
     Lines 62 - 69

Thanks for any feedback,

-Brian (and Slawek)