OpenStack Liberty Summit Talks I’m Involved With

An arm based cloud

Now that we’re past a very busy December which included the Neutron mid-cycle in Lehi, Utah, the Neutron Spec Proposal and Approval Deadline, the Kilo-1 release of Neutron, as well as some holiday’s enjoyed around the world in December, I thought it was time to take a moment and blog about where we are in Neutron, and some of the important changes coming in the Kilo release. These changes will affect everyone from developers to deployers, from operators to packagers. I’m hoping the information I’m sharing here will spark some conversations around these ideas for people who may have only heard passing information on them.

This is just a quick post to note that the devstack support for OpenDaylight was recently updated to use the Helium release of OpenDaylight. For anyone who wants to pull down devstack and have it spin-up Neutron with OpenDaylight, you will now get the latest and greatest OpenDaylight release as a part of this. My blog post on how to use this is still relevant, so if you’re looking for instructions please look there.

As I was recently given the chance to serve as Neutron PTL for a second cycle, I thought it would be a good idea for me to share some insight into what I’m hoping to achieve upstream in Kilo. I’ll have some upcoming posts on what we’re planning on accomplishing, but I wanted to first start with a post about the actual people who are allowed to merge code into Neutron, the core reviewers.

As of today, we just published the second Juno release candidate for Neutron. The expectation is this will be the final RC candidate and will become the official 2014.2 release of OpenStack Neutron. I thought I would take a moment to highlight some of the awesome work done by our community during the past 6 months.

Distributed Virtual Router

By far one of the largest, if not the largest, features we added as a team was the addition of Distributed Virtual Router (DVR) functionality. The team working on this has spent multiple cycles iterating on this code, and it finally landed in Juno. This is an exciting development because in prior versions of Neutron, the default L3 routing behavior was to send all traffic to L3 network nodes for routers. Clearly this presents issues around single points of failure on those L3 network nodes, not to mention the issue around having those L3 nodes become traffic bottlenecks. With DVR, routing functionality is distributed to each compute node, removing the need for a central L3 network node for this functionality. NAT functionality is also distributed in a similar manner. SNAT, however, is still centralized. The reason for this is due to the requirement of burning an IPV4 address on each compute node in a distributed SNAT environment. The wiki listed above has many more details on the DVR architecture.

With the Icehouse release of Neutron impending, we’ve unfortunately uncovered a bug which is affecting ODL integration with Neutron. This bug was introduced by this commit, and the reality is better CI for the ODL plugin would have caught this. I’m going to work to enable this better CI in the near future. The workaround for this is to add the following in your nova.conf:

vif_plugging_<wbr />timeout = 10
vif_plugging_<wbr />is_fatal = False

I’m working on fixing this right now. Implementing the fix above in your nova.conf will get you running again with ODL and OpenStack Neutron. Thanks to Simon Pasquire for finding this bug and noting the workaround as well!

As OpenStack marches towards it’s Icehouse release this spring, some work I’ve been doing has finally merged upstream. This week, both the OpenDaylight ML2 MechanismDriver and devstack support for OpenDaylight merged upstream. This was a huge effort which spans the efforts of many people. This was the first step in solidifying the integration of OpenDaylight with OpenStack Neutron, and we have many additional things we can do. To get a first taste of running the two together, please see the video of the OpenDaylight Summit presentation myself, Madhu Venugopal, and Brent Salisbury did in early February.

I am very lucky to be a part of six great presentation submissions for the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. The OpenStack Foundation uses voting to help decide which of these talks, panels, and tutorials will be scheduled. I would appreciate your vote for my submissions! I’ll highlight them below.

• Using OpenStack Within An OpenStack Environment: This is a talk which will be similar to the tutorial Madhu, Brent, Ryan and I did at the OpenDaylight Summit, except it will be less tutorial focused and more presentation based. We’ll show you how to use the latest OpenDaylight Hydrogen release with OpenStack Neutron. I’m hoping to add Madhu and Brent to present alongside Dave Meyer and myself.
• OpenStack Integration with OpenDaylight: State of the Union and Future Directions: In this talk, Dave Meyer and I will go over OpenDaylight for people who are new to this Open Source SDN controller. We’ll cover a bit of history and go over what’s supported in the Hydrogen release. And we’ll cover a bit about the future direction. This session will be great for people new to OpenDaylight.
• The Future of OpenStack Networking: This is a panel discussion we put together to discuss future directions of OpenStack Networking. Some great people are proposed on this panel with me: Lew Tucker, who leads Cloud Computing at Cisco and is one of the sharpest minds in the industry; Dan Dumitriu, CEO of Midokura and a trailblazer in the SDN industry; Chris Wright, Technical Director of SDN at Red Hat, and one of the best known names in Open Source networking; and Nils Swart from Plexxi, who is leading their Open Source strategy. A great group of people, this will be a fun panel if it’s accepted.
• Network Policy Abstractions in Neutron: There is work going on in Neutron to add a new Policy API layer here. This will make it easier for application developers and deployers to work with the networking subsystem in OpenStack. This is a talk which will go into details on this. I’m happy to be joined by Mohammad Banikazemi from IBM and Stephen Wong from Midokura. Anyone interested in advanced policy discussions will want to attend this discussion should it be approved.
• An Overview of Open Source Backends for Neutron: This talk will walk people through the options available in the Open Source world for OpenStack Neutron networking. Salvatore Orlando, who is one of the original Neutron core team members, will be my co-presenter, should this talk get approved. This talk would be great for people looking at deployment options which are pure open source.
• Hackathon Syllabus: This is a great talk submitted by Sean Roberts from Yahoo!, and we plan to cover how to hold a Hackathon Style user group meeting. We’ll be joined by Colin McNamara from Nexus IS and Mark Voelker from Cisco. This will be great for people who are looking at forming User Groups focused on hacking!

Please consider any or all of my talks above. I appreciate your votes and look forward to continuing to share my knowledge around Open Source networking!

If you’re a fan of networking, you are no doubt very excited by all of the recent excitement in the industry as of late. And there is no larger area of innovation in networking at the moment than Open Source networking. Two of the projects at the forefront of Open Source networking innovation are OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight. OpenStack Neutron is driving an API around networking for Infrastructure as a Service Clouds, and has been very successful at driving mindshare in this area. There are a large number of Plugins and ML2 MechanismDrivers for Neutron in existence already. However, so far, there is no OpenDaylight integration with OpenStack, at least upstream. I am pleased to announce that a team of us are working on making this happen, however. We have a blueprint filed and we are actively working towards the support in OpenDaylight required to support the Neutron APIs. What I’m going to show you in this blog post is how to take what we currently have for a test run and try it out yourself.