Neutron Star

Armando Migliaccio, Distinguished Technologist at HPE has worked on almost every OpenStack Foundation networking initiative since the organisation's inception. Currently he is the team leader of Project Neutron, an SDN-based service for OpenStack that is focused on delivering networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) in virtual environments. As he points out, the immense scale of high-density, multi-tenancy cloud environments is putting huge pressure on networks as they struggle to keep pace with the runaway new dynamism enabled by virtualisation where workloads and traffic are added or removed on-the-fly to meet new requirements. The goal of Neutron is to allow CSPs and other players to ameliorate the stresses on their networks and make it easier to deliver NaaS in the cloud. It is also designed to to provide a 'plug-in' mechanism allowing network operators to enable different technologies via a single API. However, as Mr. Migliaccio warns, while the OpenStack Foundation is a respected and popular community builder, success and rapid growth can bring their own problems in their wake. Technological demands are changing but people are not machines and it must always be borne in mind that the sheer scale and speed of transformation can present problems for humans that have to adapt and interact in the new virtual environment.

FILMED AT: OpenStack Summit 2016, Barcelona, Spain