Open Stack

We currently have a cloud infrastructure meeting our own requirements. Let's focus on some Networking features (firewall, instances isolation, spoofing control). We are thinking about moving to OpenStack and when we focus on these Networking features, Neutron comes into play. We are currently using Vyattas for these networking features (firewall, instance isolation, spoofing control) and we would like to keep it as it is right now. Therefore, if we move to OpenStack we would like Neutron to orchestrate these Vyattas but these Vyattas would be installed/configured in an outter layer, out of OpenStack. A good comparison we find is Cinder. In Cinder you can configure your storage backend (this storage backend is an external "agent" to OpenStack) and the idea with this networking features would be the same (being able to configure in Neutron our firewall backend).

This is our desired scenario, and these are the questions that we arise. We would appreciate very much your feedback:

- We believe the current Neutron FWaaS does not meet our requirement. It's not able to "talk" to an external firewall "backend". Are we right?
- In case FWaaS does not meet our requirements, we can think of implementing/modifying the Neutron source code. I don't know exactly what this implies, but if we are in the right direction, a new Neutron API set of methods would be needed. Do you think the OpenStack community would accept this change?
- Again, if we are right, apart from changing the Neutron source code to make it able to "talk" to an external firewall, we would also need to implement the firewall driver that matches the new API set of methods with the corresponding methods of the vendor's API (in our case Vyatta). Are we right?

If you think this is a wrong forum to discuss all these questions, please, could you tell us another place to discuss all this?

Thank you very much for your help and attention. We appreciate it.