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.

Since being elected as the OpenStack Neutron PTL, I’ve been mostly heads down working to ensure the Neutron project has a successful Juno release. Increasingly, and especially near OpenStack Juno milestone deadlines, I’m seeing frustration from new contributors around their contributions to Neutron. I sent an email to the openstack-dev mailing list this morning addressing this in a terse form, this blog is an attempt to expand upon that email.

I was asked to present a workshop at the Spring 2014 Open Networking Users Group (ONUG)  this past Monday. The workshop was focused on OpenStack and OpenDaylight. My slides are embedded below. The room I was given held about 40 people, but it was overflowing with attendees and was standing room only. It was great to see all of the interest in these two technologies! I’m a firm believer in Open Source, so seeing this level of attendance is always a welcome sight.

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.