OpenStack Liberty Design Summit

In multi-tenant clouds, network bandwidth guarantees can greatly improve predictability of application performance, cost and service uptime. OpenStack deployments are starting to gain such capabilities, for example using the vendor specific VMware NSX QoS extension for the NSX Neutron plugin, in addition to other recent proposals in the OpenStack community and in the academic research community.

In this talk, we will present our implementation experiences in developing a PoC for bandwidth guarantee and work conservation in OpenStack based on our published research papers: Gatekeeper and ElasticSwitch. We will describe requirements for a general bandwidth guarantee framework, including alternative models for specifying guarantees, and admission control and guarantee enforcement. We will highlight open issues with OpenStack and cross-project dependencies (e.g., between Neutron, Nova, and eventually Gantt) that pose key challenges for integrating bandwidth guarantees into OpenStack. Finally, we will show a system demonstration and share our proposal for upstream contribution. 

 

Attendees will gain insight into the benefits of using bandwidth guarantees in conjunction with conventional rate limiting and pure best effort networking. Attendees will also learn about our experiences and challenges in adding guarantee enforcement to OpenStack, and see how this capability is used to support applications deployed on OpenStack.