Increasingly, I’ve been spending more and more time playing around with and utilizing OpenStack. If you’re looking for a highly configurable and quickly maturing cloud operating system, you can’t go wrong with OpenStack. One of the more interesting parts of OpenStack to a networking guy like me is Quantum. Quantum allows you to create rich topologies of virtual networks, encompassing as much or as little as you want by utilizing different plugins. The plugin architecture is a nice design point, because it allows open source projects as well as vendors the chance to add value and differentiate themselves at this layer. Rather than boiling things down to a commodity, Quantum provides for extensions so each plugin can expose additional information above and beyond the core API.