OpenStack Summit November 2013

As the core network abstractions provided by Neutron is getting widespread usage, newer abstractions for network services (such as service insertion and service chaining) are being worked out by the Neutron community. However, it remains unclear if the provided level of abstraction is suitable at higher layers of the stack. In particular, applications that are used for deploying various workloads may find a different and higher level network abstraction more useful. In this talk we first present the Neutron abstraction for networking resources including the newly developed network services. We then show how different levels of network abstraction can be more useful at higher layers and propose alternative workload-centric abstractions for network resources. In particular, we discuss Heat and TOSCA as they relate to specifying the network requirements of various real-world workloads.