openstack team mailing list archive

[Eugene Kirpichov <ekirpichov@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello community,

We at Mirantis have had a number of clients request functionality to
control various load balancer devices (software and hardware) via an
OpenStack API and horizon. So, in collaboration with Cisco OpenStack
team and a number of other community members, we’ve started
socializing the blueprints for an elastic load balancer API service.
At this point we’d like to share where we are and would very much
appreciate anyone participate and provide input.

The current vision is to allow cloud tenants to request and
provision virtual load balancers on demand and allow cloud
administrators to manage a pool of available LB devices. Access is
provided under a unified interface to different kinds of load
balancers, both software and hardware. It means that API for tenants
is abstracted away from the actual API of underlying hardware or
software load balancers, and LBaaS effectively bridges this gap.

POC level support for Cisco ACE and HAproxy is currently implemented
in the form of plug-ins to LBaaS called “drivers”. We also started some
work on F5 drivers. Would appreciate hearing input on what other
drivers may be important at this point…nginx?

Another question we have is if this should be a standalone module or a
Quantum plugin… Dan – any feedback on this (and BTW congrats on the
acquisition =).

In order not to reinvent the wheel, we decided to base our API on
Atlas-LB (http://wiki.openstack.org/Atlas-LB).

Here are all the pointers:
 * Project overview: http://goo.gl/vZdei
 * Screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgAL-kfdbtE
 * API draft: http://goo.gl/gFcWT
 * Roadmap: http://goo.gl/EZAhf
 * Github repo: https://github.com/Mirantis/openstack-lbaas

The code is written in Python and based on the OpenStack service
template. We’ll be happy to give a walkthrough over what we have to
anyone who may be interested in contributing (for example, creating a
driver to support a particular LB device).

All of the documents and code are not set in stone and we’re writing
here specifically to ask for feedback and collaboration from the
community.

We would like to start holding weekly IRC meetings at
#openstack-meeting; we propose 19:00 UTC on Thursdays (this time seems
free according to http://wiki.openstack.org/Meetings/ ), starting Aug 2.

--
Eugene Kirpichov
http://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekirpichov