Networking for OpenStack: What Should You Know about Juno?
As the “J” release of OpenStack, the popular open source cloud environment approaches, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for each of the individual projects within. Dubbed “Juno”, this release will become available in October 2014 with many exciting features and improvements.
Networking is a Key Component
While there are many projects that are being updated, and some new ones being introduced, one of most often discussed is the networking component of the OpenStack cloud ecosystem. There are currently two networking projects which are core to OpenStack. Those are nova-network, the original legacy networking project which continues to be married to the Nova Compute project, and Neutron.
Neutron is the more fully featured standalone project which is the culmination of many contributors, and contains tie-ins for working with overlay networks, advanced features such as LBaaS (Load Balancing as a Service), FWaaS (Firewall as a Service), and much more.
Legacy and nova-network
At the Grizzly release it was generally discussed that nova-network, the legacy networking features backing OpenStack in the releases up to that point, should be deprecated in favor of the more feature-rich Neutron networking project.
The challenge came with the realization that nova-network was both widely used, and terribly difficult to upgrade/migrate to Neutron. In fact, Neutron itself was not yet “upgrade friendly” unless you’ve chosen to stick directly to the trunk release and embrace CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) of the core code.
Since many, if not most, organizations were not aligning to that model, there was a choice that had to be made. The OpenStack contributors and developers continued to work towards enhancing and improving both networking environments in order to allow either stream of implementation to continue to live and grow with the OpenStack releases.
Juno will be the 10th production release of OpenStack since its inception in 2010. This will mark an exciting milestone, and the features that are coming in this release will be met by smiles of administrators and implementors of OpenStack.
The team at Red Hat have written a nice round up blog on the upcoming networking features here that I recommend reading to get ready for what’s coming in Juno.
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