Show 227 – OpenStack Neutron Overview with Kyle Mestery

Today’s Packet Pushers adventure is piloted by hosts Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro. They are joined by guide Kyle Mestery on a tour of OpenStack Neutron.

What’s OpenStack? OpenStack is an orchestration platform used to build clouds. OpenStack is broken into several different components, one of which is Neutron.

So…what’s Neutron? Neutron is OpenStack’s networking module. Remember that OpenStack is an orchestration platform – that means that Neutron doesn’t do networking as such. Rather, Neutron provides an interface OpenStack users can consume to get networking done. Tell Neutron what you need the network to do, and Neutron configures the network components as required.

Of course, not every network device out there works with Neutron, but it has become trendy for networking vendors to work with OpenStack. Thus, Neutron integration is a demo we’ve seen from vendors increasingly over the last couple of years. Tightly coupling with OpenStack allows vendors to ride the wave of network automation and cloud adoption that’s happening in certain corners of the IT world.

What We Discuss

• What’s Neutron?
• Why has it become so interesting / important to networking vendors?
• How do end consumers of OpenStack interact with Neutron? Or do they?
• VLAN vs. VXLAN scaling.
• Hardware/underlay vs. soft edge/overlay networking.
• The purposes of L2 gateways.
• OpenFlow – interesting to Neutron?
• What’s the Neutron roadmap look like?

Links

• OpenStack home page
• Neutron wiki
• Kyle Mestery’s blog (SiliconLoons.com)