NetworkService
This blueprint is being redrafted. Ewan Mellor will be happy to hear from you if you wish to contribute. Nothing here is committed.
There is a Discussion section at the end of this blueprint. Please feel free to put comments there.
- Launchpad Nova blueprint: NovaSpec:network-service
- Created: 31 January 2011
- Last updated: 24 March 2011
- Drafter: Ewan Mellor
- Contributors: Ilya Alekseyev, Patrick Ancillotti, Andrey Brindeyev, Erik Carlin, Rick Clark, Dan Mihai Dumitriu, Ram Durairaj, Søren Hansen, Koji Iida, Hisaharu Ishii, Masanori Itoh, Adam Johnson, Youcef Laribi, Romain Lenglet, Brad McConnell, Eldar Nugaev, Salvatore Orlando, John Purrier, Andy Smith, Troy Toman, Dan Wendlandt, Zhixue Wu
<<TableOfContents()>>
Glossary
NaaS: Network as a Service
Openstack-NaaS: The customer-facing service proposed by this blueprint. This distinguishes it from the existing nova-network.
Higher Layer services: L4/L7 network services which might be enabled for networks created by NaaS.
The OpenStack NaaS API: The customer-facing API exposed by openstack-NaaS.
VIF: Virtual InterFace. A VM's network interface. Also known as a vNIC.
Summary
The goal of this blueprint is to add a first-class, customer-facing service for the management of network infrastructure within an OpenStack cloud. This will allow service providers to offer "Networking as a Service" (NaaS) to their customers.
This blueprint discusses goals, use cases, requirements and design ideas for features and capabilities to enable in openstack-NaaS in order to be able to create and manage networks intended as collection of ports with shared connectivity, which provide VM instances with Layer-2 and possibly Layer-3 connectivity.
Higher-layer services, such as Firewall, NAT, VPN, and Load Balancing, will instead be provided by distinct services communicating with NaaS through exposed APIs. L4/L7 services are discussed at this wiki page'.
Pre-requisites
Multiple VIFs per VM. Not in OpenStack in Cactus, but expected to be added to Nova through NovaSpec:multi-nic and NovaSpec:multinic-libvirt for Diablo. This is required for all supported virtualization technologies (currently KVM/libvirt, XenAPI, Hyper-V, ESX).
Development Resources
No commitments have been made yet, but development resources have been offered by Citrix, Grid Dynamics, NTT, Midokura, and Rackspace.
We will sort out how to share the development burden when this specification is nearer completion.
Work in Progress
The following blueprints concerning Network Services for Openstack have been registered:
- Network Service POC, registered by Hisaharu Ishii from NTT-PF Lab. There is also some POC code being worked on at lp:~ntt-pf-lab/nova/network-service
- NovaSpec:netcontainers, registered by Ram Durairaj from Cisco
- NovaSpec:naas-project, register by Rick Clark, which can be regarded as an attempt to merge all these blueprints in a single specification for NaaS.
Also:
- Erik Carlin is working on a draft spec for the OpenStack Networking API.
- As already mentioned, work on supporting multiple virtual network cards per instance is already in progress. NovaSpec:nova-multi-nic
- Ilya Alekseyev has registered the NovaSpec:distros-net-injection blueprint in order to support file-system-based IP configuration in injection for a number of linux distros (nova now supports debian-based distros only). Christian Berendt also registered a similar blueprint, NovaSpec:injection
- Dan Wendlandt has registered NovaSpec:openvswitch-network-plugin for a NaaS plugin based on Open vSwitch
Discussion
Etherpad from discussion session at Bexar design summit: http://etherpad.openstack.org/i5aSxrDeUU
Etherpad from alternative discussion session at Bexar design summit: http://etherpad.openstack.org/6tvrm3aEBt
Slide deck from discussion session at Bexar design summit: http://www.slideshare.net/danwent/bexar-network-blueprint
