OpenStack Networking ("Quantum")

Administrator Guide

API Developer Doc (v2)

Source code

Bug tracker

Blueprints

Related projects

Python Quantum client
Quantum Admin and API documentation in OpenStack Manuals

What is Quantum?

Quantum is an OpenStack project to provide "network connectivity as a service" between interface devices (e.g., vNICs) managed by other Openstack services (e.g., nova).

Starting in the Folsom release, Quantum is a core and supported part of the OpenStack platform (for Essex, we were an "incubated" project, which means use is suggested only for those who really know what they're doing with Quantum).

If you're a networking geek and like to hack on OpenStack, please join!

More Info:

Overview of Quantum (3/26/12)
Video Quantum Overview (3/7/12)
Somewhat outdated slides describing Quantum from the Diablo Summit (4/28/11)
Quantum Design Principles

Why Quantum?

Give cloud tenants an API to build rich networking topologies, and configure advanced network policies in the cloud.
- Example: create multi-tier web application topology
Enable innovation plugins (open and closed source) that introduce advanced network capabilities
- Example: use L2-in-L3 tunneling to avoid VLAN limits, provide end-to-end QoS guarantees, used monitoring protocols like NetFlow.
Let anyone build advanced network services (open and closed source) that plug into Openstack tenant networks.
- Examples: VPN-aaS, firewall-aaS, IDS-aaS, data-center-interconnect-aaS.

Using Quantum

Following the instructions in the Quantum Administrator Guide to use Quantum with OpenStack Nova.

Forget documentation, I just want to get the code!: Quantum Downloads

Detailed information for programming against v1.0 of the Quantum web services API is available in the Quantum API Guide

If you are looking for Quantum packaged for your Linux distribution, please see: QuantumPackages .

If you are looking for information on using Quantum with devstack, please see: QuantumDevstack .

Quantum let's you use a set of different backends called "plugins" that work with a growing variety of networking technologies. These plugins may be distributed as part of the main Quantum release, or separately.

The set of plugin included in the main Quantum distribution and supported by the Quantum community includes:

Open vSwitch Plugin
Cisco UCS/Nexus Plugin
Linux Bridge Plugin
Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) Plugin
Ryu OpenFlow Controller Plugin
NEC OpenFlow Plugin

Additional Plugins are available from other sources:

If you have your own plugin, feel free to add it to this list.

Current Project Status

Quantum was proposed at the Diablo summit (end of April 2011) and since then we've made a ton of progress.

The 2012.1 "Essex" release includes:

v1.0 and v1.1 of the Quantum API
API Extensibility Framework
API Client Library and CLI
Integration with OpenStack Nova via the QuantumManager
Several plugins:
- Open vSwitch Plugin
- Cisco UCS/Nexus Plugin
- Linux Bridge Plugin
- Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) Plugin
- Ryu OpenFlow Controller Plugin
Integration with Devstack (see: http://wiki.openstack.org/QuantumDevstack)
Packaging for Ubuntu 12.04, Fedora 17 and Debian wheezy/unstable.

Participate

To get code, ask questions, view blueprints, etc, see: Quantum Launchpad Page

See QuantumDevelopment for some (rough) guides on how to contribute code to Quantum, including how to add your own plugin.

If you would like to participate, please send mail to the netstack list: https://launchpad.net/~netstack

You can also attend our regular IRC meetings, which start one hour after the main openstack meeting, on the same #openstack-meeting channel: http://wiki.openstack.org/Network/Meetings

Check out QuantumStarterBugs for ideas on easy bugs or starter projects you might tackle. Or just start playing with QuantumDevstack and come up with your own ideas!

Neutron