OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

Would you like to be able to move applications seamlessly between OpenStack Powered clouds?  Sure you would—but today, that’s hard.  One of the trickiest aspects of interoperability today is the network stack: OpenStack has multiple networking API’s available that can’t be deployed together, making it difficult to create an interoperable standard.  Without an interoperable standard, applications become a tangle of if/else loops to account for the different possible networking capabilities of various public clouds, appliances, distributions, and managed offerings--and it’s difficult to determine which products support which networking options at all.  Interoperability by if/else loop isn’t really interoperability at all.

The OpenStack community is responding to the challenge of creating an interoperable standard between OpenStack Powered products via the work of the DefCore Committee.  The DefCore Guidelines seek to define core in such a way that OpenStack Powered products can be verifiably tested for adherence to an interoperability standard and consumers can make informed decisions about what they deploy and how they write their applications.  But the DefCore Committe can't operate in a vacume: solving interoperability in networking requires the help of the technical community, the Board of Directors, the DefCore Committee, vendors, and operators.

In this talk, members of the Nova and Neutron technical communities and the DefCore Committee will discuss the history of networking in OpenStack, take the current temperature of OpenStack's networking stacks, and discuss how the DefCore Committee, technical community, and Board of Directors are working together to solve the interoperability problem.  We’ll explain what’s being proposed for the next DefCore Guideline and how we as a community got there.  Attendees will learn about the impact on operators and vendors and leave with an understanding of what to expect of OpenStack Powered (TM) products that meet interoperable networking standards in the future.  We’ll also discuss the feedback that’s been generated so far from operators, vendors, and developers and discuss the future of interoperable networking in OpenStack.