It is rather well known that Neutron comes with a built-in networking backend made of several agents which interact with the ML2 plugin. They are:
- The Openvswitch and Linuxbridge agents, which manage L2 connectivity
- The DHCP agent, which is responsible for managing IP leases
- The L3 agent, which takes care of L3 forwarding, Source NAT for externally-bound traffic and Floating IPs
- The metadata agent, which connects Neutron networks to the Nova metadata server
- And last but not least, the agents for managing advanced services such as Load Balancing, Firewalling, and VPN
However, the choice of Open Source solution which can be used as a Neutron backend is actually wider; deployers are therefore able to choose the backend which better fits their architectural model. The aim of this talk is therefore to
- explore these backends, and briefly look at their capabilities and architecture
- analyze how they integrate with Neutron, and how they mix & match with the various neutron agents
- see them in action (*) and discuss pro and cons
This talk will look at both backends which are in the Neutron source code tree and backends which are not yet there (**)
(*) at least some of them as the allocated time slot would hardly allow for showing all
(**) support for some backends such as ODL and OpenContrail is currently under review and might or might not be merged by the time of the summit.
