Networking

My first publication OpenStack Networking Cookbook is now available for purchase. It is available as a printed book as well as e-book. OpenStack is a rapidly evolving cloud platform and Networking (Neutron) is one of its critical components. The current trends of SDN and NFV make OpenStack Networking even more exciting and complex. I have co-authored the book with a colleague and the overall experience of writing a book was very satisfying.

OpenStack supports rich abstractions to handle virtual networking needs in a cloud. As a user the most visible entities are the Network, Subnets, Routers, Firewall etc. But if we consider ingress and egress points for data traffic, the most critical entity is the Port. OpenStack Neutron Ports are usually created automatically as part of other user operations. However the CLI allows users to create Ports independently as well.

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.

This is a guest post by Suryanarayana M N V. Having led teams working on Networking protocols, Surya has in-depth knowledge of networking. He has keen interest in the areas of Network Virtualization and NFV. One of the buzzwords in the networking industry is NFV. In a series of blogs, I plan to share my understanding of NFV, its benefits, some of the products and its relationship with SDN.

In my first YouTube video, I discuss 3 networking concepts:

• Default Gateway
• DNS Server
• Subnet Mask