News

Midokura SDN Supports OpenStack Liberty, Container Networking

• By David Ramel
• 10/30/2015

Midokura's software-defined networking (SDN) virtualization technology now supports the latest OpenStack release, Liberty, and the Kuryr project for container networking.

The Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) technology is described as "a scalable network virtualization solution designed for Infrastructure-as-a Service (IaaS) clouds." The open source OpenStack cloud computing platform is a key player in that arena, and Midokura's new release supports the 12th and latest release, Liberty, from that project.

"Much like the recently unveiled OpenStack Liberty release, our new MEM technology delivers on the industry's requests of a diverse community of OpenStack and container users," Mikokura CEO Dan Dumitriu said in a statement this week. "There's a clear pent-up demand for automation as infrastructure density increases and our new technology release squarely addresses this."

The technology also addresses the rise of container technology, which encapsulates an application and all its dependencies into a virtual container package designed to run the same wherever it's deployed. Docker Inc. is the leader in that burgeoning industry and has become almost synonymous with the technology.

Midokura is supporting the container movement through Kuryr, an open source project that provides a plugin that brings OpenStack networking technology called Neutron to bear on Docker containers. In fact, a Midokura software engineer is a leader of the Kuryr project, the company said.

"Today's release of MEM is one of the industry's first Neutron plug-ins supporting OpenStack Liberty. It also supports OpenStack Kilo and Juno, and is designed to advance container networking with the new Kuryr project," Midokura said. "Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components, such as libnetwork, is the gateway between the container networking APIs and use cases, and the Neutron APIs and services. It bridges the gaps between Docker and Neutron and will drive the changes necessary to fill in the missing pieces in Neutron."

Midokura said it plans future improvements to Kuryr in subsequent MEM releases.

The company's new commercial MEM solution is available now, with a free 30-day evaluation, and an open source version of its core MidoNet technology, which it made available last year, can also be downloaded for free.