NFV on OpenStack

Question

I am fairly new to the NFV+SDN. I have downloaded the OpenDayLight and OpenStack in one Fedora 20 VM. I have mininet network as underlying physical topology in a separate VM. I want to run services like VPN, L3 routing and NAT, Loadbalancing etc on OpenStack, but I don't have a very clear image on how to start. As far as I have understood I have to run these services on OpenStack nodes (through VM instances) and route the traffic through mininet topology with OpenDayLight as the controller in the middle.

My confusions are:

1. How to start writing the applications (Firewall, VPN, NAT, etc) on OpenStack?
2. Do I have to write a code for such services or is it command line configuration?
3. I came across Neutron API, Is that of any help?

Came across this: http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-network/2.0/content/API_extensions.html

I have looked at the other questions regarding writing "Hello World" on OpenStack but could not find anything. I shall be grateful to you for any information that could get me started on this project.

Answer 1

For your confusions- You do NOT need to write code explicitly for Firewall / VPN / LB. You need to configure the Openstack Neutron to allow these services directly. The code is already present. You need to configure them to use them. For NAT there is L3 agent already running in the default setup ( al least via packstack )

Neutron API is of any use??? I assume you are refering to REST API and NOT CLI. Well everything that you do on Dashboard is actualy represented as a REST API to Neutron Server ( not just Neutron but all the other components of Openstack ). All the components of Openstack ( Neutron, Nova, Glance, Keystone, etc ) interact via REST API with each other and RPC mechanism within each component. All the clicks on the Dashboard are actually thrown as a REST API call to the component servers!