Introduction to Neutron, the OpenStack network service

Neutron is network service for OpenStack which provides a variety of networking options in an OpenStack cloud. Its old name was Quantum and it was later renamed to Neutron. Neutron uses a vast array of plugins to provide different network configurations.

Neutron contains the following components:

• Neutron server (neutron-server and neutron-*-plugin): The Neutron server handles incoming REST API requests. It communicates to the database using plugins
• Plugin agent (neutron-*-agent): The plugin agent runs on each compute node to manage the local virtual switch (vswitch) configuration
• DHCP agent (neutron-dhcp-agent): The DHCP agent provides DHCP services to tenant networks. This agent is responsible for maintaining all DHCP configurations
• L3 agent (neutron-l3-agent): The L3 agent provides L3/NAT forwarding for the external network access of VMs on tenant networks
• Network provider services (SDN server/services): This service provides additional...