OpenStack

I briefly talked about OpenStack Neutron plugins and agents in my blog about OpenStack Neutron components. In this blog, let us go a step further and understand the roles of plugins and the agents.

Neutron is the networking project within the OpenStack cloud platform. The purpose of OpenStack Neutron is to provide physical and virtual network resources to the instances (or virtual machines). Before you continue to read this article I would recommend that you read about OpenStack networking concepts. To appreciate the architecture and the functionality of Neutron, it is important to understand the components that are part of Neutron.

The goal of this blog is to share some details about how I have setup a cost-effective OpenStack Lab at home. For most enthusiasts, DevStack is the preferred way to experiment with OpenStack. But I wanted something more realistic for my experiments. OpenStack is intended for multi-tenant, distributed and highly scalable cloud. To appreciate its architecture I needed to move beyond DevStack. With a more realistic setup, you can understand how the distributed OpenStack components interact with each other.

In data center and cloud environment, servers used for hosting the virtual machines usually have more than one wired networking interfaces. In fact there are multiple Ethernet interfaces on each server. It is common practice to use one of the interface for ‘managing’ the host itself. This interface is usually accessible from corporate networks and administrators will use this interface for doing SSH into the server. The other interfaces are usually used for virtual machine traffic or storage traffic.

I continue the series on virtual networking with an overview of OpenStack networking concepts. OpenStack is an open source project with an aim to create a scalable cloud operating platform. The primary goal of this software platform is to help build public and private clouds. Specifically it allows users to build and operate infrastructure as a service or IaaS clouds.