Network

The last of the foundational services in OpenStack is Neutron, the Network service. Neutron provides an API for creating ports, subnets, networks, and routers. Additional network services, such as firewalls and load balancers, are provided in some OpenStack deployments.

As with Cinder, the reference implementation, based on Open vSwitch, is typically used in test environments or smaller deployments. Large-scale production deployments will leverage one of the many available software-based or hardware-based SDN solutions, which have Neutron drivers. These solutions range from open source implementations such as Juniper's OpenContrail to proprietary solutions such as VMware's NSX platform.