Best Container Networking Software for OpenStack

Calico is an open source networking and security solution for containers, virtual machines and native host-based workloads. Calico supports many platforms, including Kubernetes and OpenShift, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, (MKE), OpenStack and bare metal. Calico delivers lightning-fast performance and true cloud-native scalability, regardless of whether you use Calico's eBPF or Linux's standard network pipeline. Calico offers developers and cluster operators a consistent experience and set capabilities, whether they are running on-prem or in the public cloud, on a single node or in a multi-thousand-node cluster. Calico offers a variety of data planes. These include a pure Linux-based eBPF data plan, a standard Linux networking data data plane and a Windows HNS information plane. Calico has the right data plane for you, whether you prefer the cutting-edge features offered by eBPF or the familiarity provided by the standard primitives that system administrators already know.

Open vSwitch, a multilayer virtual switch licensed under open source Apache 2.0, is a high-quality, production-quality virtual switch. It's designed to allow massive network automation via programmatic extension while still supporting standard management interfaces & protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, 802.1ag). It is also designed to distribute across multiple physical servers, similar to Cisco's Nexus 1000V or VMware's vNetwork distributed switch. Open vSwitch can be used in multiple products, and it runs in large production environments (some very large). Every stable release goes through hundreds of system-level and thousands of unit testing. The OVN project is maintained by the Open vSwitch group. OVN adds native support for virtual network abstractions to OVS, such as virtual L2 overlays and L3 overlays, and security groups.

With one security and networking tool, you can solve your tooling overload and tooling complexity. Consolidating saves time and reduces the risk of getting swivel-chair fatigue due to context switches. TF is a plugin integration super-star, never implementing anything less than necessary. Here's a sample of what TF can do that other SDN plugins cannot. Networks require that borders be crossed. TF is a specialist in the use of the same language as the data and control planes, so your domain is never an island. Open source allows innovation to flow from many directions and gives you the freedom to create the outcomes you want or to trust vendors. Optional Namespace isolation and per microservice micro-segmentation, with the choice of TF tenants or networks or security rules

Flannel is a virtual layer of networking that was specifically designed for containers. OpenShift Container Platform can use it to create networking containers, instead of the default software defined networking (SDN). This is useful when OpenShift Container Platform is running within a cloud provider platform which also relies upon SDN (e.g. OpenStack) and you want to avoid having packets encapsulated twice through both platforms. Each flanneld agent gives this information to a central etcd store, so that other agents on hosts can route packets within the flannel system. The following diagram shows the architecture and data flow between containers using a Flannel network.