OpenStack Summit May 2014 Atlanta

A new set of application centric network abstractions are being developed in the form of the Neutron Group Policy extension. In this model, networking requirements of applications are expressed as network policies. On the other hand, there have been significant work on defining network services (*aaS), service insertion and service chaining in the Neutron community. More recently work on Network Function Virtualization and a framework for advanced services in virtual machines have been getting attention.

In this talk, we first discuss the state of the work in implementing the Neutron Group Policy extension and show how a more application-centric view of networking resources can be used to specify and deploy applications. In particular, we demonstrate the use of network policies as defined in a Heat template to specify and deploy an application. We then explore how the Neutron Group Policy extension can take advantage of advances in defining network services and functions and bring about a truly application centric view of networking resources. We show how this view impacts different layers of the stack from end to end and discuss the future directions of the Neutron Group Policy extension.