All, During the 2019 CCC @ Apachecon North America, a few of us discussed the need for a new Software Defined Networking (SDN) integration for CloudStack, now that Nuage has chosen to depreciate their SDN product portfolio. I've been working closely with Sven Vogel on outlining how we might be able to start a Special Interest Group (SIG) to design and build an ACS network plugin into the Linux Foundation project Tungsten Fabric (Formally known as Open Contrail).
Both Sven's company, EWERK and my company ENA are willing to contribute developers to this effort, as we feel it's important for Apache CloudStack to have a robust SDN option that utilizes a well known and stable open source SDN project and one that is community supported. Although there is an existing plugin for Contrail that was originally contributed by Juniper, it has been orphaned in the ACS code base for many years and to my knowledge, it’s unusable. Over the years, we've had a number of SDN integrations come and go. This has left users in the lurch and discouraged other potential companies from considering these options, as one has to be confident in the longevity of the plugin. Why Tungsten Fabric? Tungsten Fabric has been around for quite a while and it is now officially a Linux Foundation project, so it has a considerable amount of support behind it. It's scalable, multi-tenant, supports a number of advanced security features, as well a large chunk of built in components we currently need a Virtual Router to provide. It's dual stack IPV4 and IPV6 and heavily utilizes BGP and MPLS. This makes it ideal for those of us that maintain our own networks, as it will provide tight integration options and eliminate the need for complicated Private Gateway (PG) setups for VPCs. Additionally, with service stitching and EVPN capabilities, it will make it a lot easier for operators to support other platforms without having to build a dedicated plugin, or figure out how to support those network or security features through other L2/L3 hacks. Sven and I would like to gauge feedback from the community on this proposal and see whether other organizations are interested in participating. Thanks, Sven and Simon
