A lot has been said about Software Defined Networking in the Cloud Computing context. Most modern solutions are based on technologies such as OpenFlow, Open vSwitch and Open Daylight. And they almost all have serious technical issues avoiding proper scale out and sometimes even impacting normal operations in small-scale environments. If you’re out for SDN today, you will find yourself soon looking out for alternatives. OpenContrail is one of them: Based on standard protocols such as MPLS, OpenContrail allows you to realize virtual networks while retaining the advantages provided by real hardware.

At SysEleven, we’ve been working on an OpenStack-based cloud offering over the last year. One of the major design decisions was to go with OpenContrail as the stack for Software Defined Networking. This presentation will give you an insight into why we found other solutions such as OpenFlow inappropriate and what the challenges were in getting OpenContrail up and running. You will learn what our current SDN scenario looks like and what conclusions we have come to based on the experience that we’ve made.