I Can Haz Moar Networks? - Tim Fall of Midokura

Our speaker this month will be Tim Fall, OpenStack Person of Infamy; and occasional Cloud Architect @ Midokura

So you want to build a cloud? Or maybe you have a cloud already, and you want it to work. Well great, you got the first step out of the way, your users can create all the virtual machines they could possibly want. So everything should be unicorns and rainbows right? What happens when your users want to connect their machines to something else?

How your users connect their virtual machines to the outside (and each other) is just as important, if not more, than the virtual machines themselves. For most of us, the cloud model we follow is the same one used at Amazon, Digital Ocean, Google Compute Engine, and all the others. Machines get an “internal” address and, if they want to connect to the outside, an “external” address. That’s it, chocolate or vanilla. So what happens if a user is writing a program that uses a clustered database? Can the databases be placed on their own network so they can be regulated? Do they need to go out to the external network and back in to communicate with the non-database components?

If you’re going to virtualize your machines, why not virtualize the networks that connect them together? In this talk we’ll go over a new model for tenant-controllable networking that lets cloud operators give their users the ability to customize and control their networks, in the same way they do for compute power, storage, etc. We’ll also go over some use cases directly applicable to different cloud infrastructure. Finally, we’ll do a live demo of how networks can change on a programmatic time scale to accommodate even the most absurd needs. Plug your ears, we’re going to blow your mind.