Of everything that we can build and deploy in a highly-available fashion in OpenStack, deploying highly available networking has been one of the trickiest, most complex aspects to get right.
In Neutron, when choosing the reference implementation, we have several components to consider when deploying for high availability:
- Neutron-server and its plugins are an API service as any other, with the same HA considerations, albeit with some aspects that deserve extra scrutiny when building for high availability
- Neutron L2 agents on compute nodes must ensure network connectivity for Nova guests
- and Neutron agents on network nodes must gracefully ensure routing and DHCP functionality even in the face of hardware failure
HA has also historically not been a very strong focus of upstream Neutron development, with vendors frequently filling the gaps with automation tools and smart service deployment.
In this presentation we cover:
- Upstream improvements on Neutron HA capabilities over the Juno, Kilo, and Liberty releases
- The approach taken for Neutron high availability in RHEL OSP and SUSE OpenStack Cloud
- Implementation details for Neutron HA in RHEL OSP and SUSE OpenStack Cloud
... All presented in the spirit of friendly competition, and upstream collaboration.
