Sdn Start-up Midokura and its product introduction

In October 2012, Midokura with its flagship SDN platform Midonet in the United States. According to Midokura, Midonet is a distributed, decentralized virtual platform that separates users ' cloud assets from the network infrastructure and provides a more scalable and efficient network solution for a highly virtualized cloud environment.

1 midonet Overview

Midonet is an open, software-only, highly scalable, resilient network virtualization system. Because of its distributed architecture, it allows businesses and service providers to build, run, and manage virtual networks for increased control, security, and flexibility.

Midonet allows users to build isolated networks and overwrite existing network hardware infrastructures. Users can create and scale networks with great flexibility.

work together with existing hardware Midonet protects devices that are already in use, avoids vendor lock-in, and works with any of the underlying network hardware.

Shorten application deployment time Midonet reduces the network's supply time from weeks to seconds, enabling end users to access applications on demand and without delay.

Enhanced Network Scalability Midonet uses a distributed control architecture rather than centralized control, which allows users to scale network capabilities linearly by increasing network nodes.

reduce capex and OpEx Midonet allows users to increase network size without the need to purchase any additional network hardware, helping to manage the network through a single management platform.

Dynamically configuring the network three-tier routing capability based on application requirements allows VMs to be migrated live anywhere in the datacenter, while a two-tier VM migration can only be in the same architecture.

replaces the default OvS plug-in in the OpenStack environment The midonet replaces the default OvS plug-in in the OpenStack environment, providing neutron network functionality that improves network stability, performance, and resiliency. The midonet plug-in distributed feature avoids a single point of failure.

2 Midonet Features

the 4-tier load balancer midonet proxy acts as a 4-tier load balancer, allowing for active-active configuration and equal distribution of egress and ingress traffic.

High Availability Midonet's distributed architecture enables high scalability and availability of the network. The programmable nature of the network allows applications to configure the network and ensure high availability.

logical firewalls and security groups The Midonet Proxy can act as a logical firewall and implement security groups. ACLs and security policies can be applied to a security group to provide fine-grained security.

L2 Layer-L4 Network Service Midonet facilitates network services such as switching, routing, DHCP, NAT, load balancing, firewalls, and so on.

The Vxlan Gateway allows communication between virtual devices and physical devices. Midonet simulates a network topology that allows packets to be transmitted in a single hop.

Gateway Service for L2 layer-L3 layer The VLAN-aware Gateway Service helps virtual networks connect to physical networks or devices. L3/BGP Gateway Services help connect workloads and networks.

Solutions for pure software Midonet provides a distributed, pure software solution that runs on a standard X86 server. Helps create on-demand, programmable virtual networks to provide a highly scalable, flexible network.

RESTful API and SDK Architecture The midonet can be used to connect to any cloud management platform and to a programming overlay network. Midonet supports the real-world standards of neutron interfaces, cloud networks, which can be used to create rich network topologies and advanced network services, and to help avoid vendor lock-in.

switching and routing in a multi-tenant virtualized environment, the hypervisor forwarding plane provides linear routing and switching capabilities that are fully decoupled from the underlying physical switches.

Nat provides stateful and stateless Nat.

Security Midonet helps define security and access policies for the virtual network and executes them within seconds.

Multi-tenancy Midonet allows the virtual network to be isolated, so that resources can be shared securely among multiple groups of users.

3 Midonet Architecture and Technology

IP Fabric requires an IP connection when it runs the midonet overlay network. This means that the user is not locked in a particular network device vendor or model, and can even be mixed and matched. This allows users to build a personalized physical network in the way and demand they want.

midonet Agent Midonet agent is a distributed brain of virtual network, as a software agent, installed in the hypervisor host. The Midonet agent is responsible for establishing new network traffic and controlling the fast path of the kernel to provide distributed midonet network functions such as switching, routing, NAT, etc. When scaling is required, the size depends on the capacity of the virtual network.

Midonet Gateway The Midonet agent is installed on a standard X86 server and can be used as a distributed, large-scale gateway. Because the gateway server uses the Midonet proxy, all traffic from the external network will be handled by the network joint point. This means that routing, security groups, firewalls, and load balancing can be handled at the edge of the network.

The Midonet gateway has the following advantages:

• Maximum efficiency--illegal network traffic will be discarded at the edge of the network and will not pass through your physical private network.
• Because the midonet agent is fully distributed, you can expand the gateway service by simply adding more X86 servers at the edge of the network. Because the midonet has elastic bounce and extensible features, there is no need to manage active/standby failure scenarios.

Midonet provides two options for connecting to an external network:

• Three-layer Gateway

Layer three gateways use BGP to connect to external networks and broadcast IP addresses to external networks. Each gateway server runs a midonet agent that can broadcast the same range of IP addresses and can easily expand traffic between north and south.

• Two-tier Gateway

A two-tier gateway is a highly available gateway that can bridge physical VLANs and midonet logical networks.

Network State Database Midonet Stores network configuration and state in a DB cluster, and the database stores advanced configuration information such as topology, routing, NAT settings, and so on. Unlike other overlay networks, Midonet does not centrally handle network functions or set up streams, which are handled entirely by midonet agents. The network state database not only stores highly available configuration and network status, but also notifies the midonet agent of any related changes.

The Midonet agent detects their local cache data. When the network configuration changes, such as changing the firewall rules, the midonet agent that is handling the affected traffic immediately perceives the change and creates a new stream as new changes occur.

midonet API Midonet can be centrally configured, or fully automated through restful APIs. When a request is received, it passes the information to the network state database. The Midonet API is stateless, so you can run a variety of API servers to handle scaling and fault tolerance.

Orchestration Midonet with popular cloud management systems such as OpenStack deep integration, through the Midonet API can be easily integrated into any environment. By integrating these platforms, Midonet can easily build and scale networks.

hypervisor Support The midonet supports hypervisor-based KVM, ESX, LXC.

Open VSwitch Core module/data path Midonet communicates directly with the Linux data path (Open vSwitch) to create flow and control packet actions. Once the stream is created in the data path, the packets in the stream are no longer in the user space, but near the line rate to propagate on the fast path. In this way, Midonet can provide many network services without sacrificing performance.

4 concluding remarks

Midokura provides a cloud service solution for the company, its services through the cloud platform, reducing the cost of managing cloud computing and simplifying the relevant requirements, has achieved good results. It is learnt that at present Midokura has raised considerable financing, it will recruit, I believe in the near future will introduce more and better products.

Article from http://www.sdnlab.com/3874

Sdn Start-up Midokura and its product introduction