Best Container Networking Software for OpenStack

Calico is an open-source networking and network security solution for containers, virtual machines, and native host-based workloads. Calico supports a broad range of platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE), OpenStack, and bare metal services. Whether you opt to use Calico's eBPF data plane or Linux’s standard networking pipeline, Calico delivers blazing-fast performance with true cloud-native scalability. Calico provides developers and cluster operators with a consistent experience and set of capabilities whether running in the public cloud or on-prem, on a single node, or across a multi-thousand-node cluster. Calico gives you a choice of data planes, including a pure Linux eBPF data plane, a standard Linux networking data plane, and a Windows HNS data plane. Whether you prefer the cutting-edge features of eBPF or the familiarity of the standard primitives that existing system administrators already know, Calico has you covered.

Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, 802.1ag). In addition, it is designed to support distribution across multiple physical servers similar to VMware's vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco's Nexus 1000V. Open vSwitch is used in multiple products and runs in many large production environments (some very, very large). Each stable release is run through a regression suite of hundreds of system-level tests and thousands of unit tests. In addition to OVS, the Open vSwitch community maintains the OVN project. OVN complements the existing capabilities of OVS to add native support for virtual network abstractions, such as virtual L2 and L3 overlays and security groups.

Solve your tooling complexity and overload with the simplicity of only one networking and security tool. Save time and swivel-chair fatigue from context switches as you consolidate. TF is a plugin integration overachiever, never implementing the bare minimum. Here is a sample of what it can do that most other SDN plugins can’t. Networks have borders that need crossing. Speaking the same language of proven open protocol standards in the control and data plane is TF’s specialty, so that your domain is never an island. Open source keeps innovation flowing from many directions, and provides the flexibility to shape the outcomes you need, or turn to vendors you trust. Option of Namespace isolation and per-microservice micro-segmentation with choice of TF tenants, networks or security rules

flannel is a virtual networking layer designed specifically for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it for networking containers instead of the default software-defined networking (SDN) components. This is useful if running OpenShift Container Platform within a cloud provider platform that also relies on SDN, such as OpenStack, and you want to avoid encapsulating packets twice through both platforms. Each flanneld agent provides this infomation to a centralized etcd store so other agents on hosts can route packets to other containers within the flannel network. The following diagram illustrates the architecture and data flow from one container to another using a flannel network.