VMware: Making OpenStack Neutron Better for Everyone

In any open source project, there’s often a lot of work that has to happen “in the background,” so to speak, out of the view of the users that consume that open source project. This work often involves improvements in the performance, modularity, or supportability of the project without the addition of new features or new functionality. Sometimes this work is intended to help “pay technical debt” that has accumulated over the life of the project. As a result, users of the project may remain blissfully unaware of the significant work involved in such efforts. However, the importance of these “invisible” efforts cannot be understated.

One such effort within the OpenStack community is called neutron-lib (more information is available here). In a nutshell, neutron-lib is about two things:

1. It aims to build a common networking library that Neutron and all Neutron sub-projects can leverage, with the eventual goal of breaking all dependencies between sub-projects.
2. Pay down accumulated technical debt in the Neutron project by refactoring and enhancing code as it is moved to this common library.

To a user—using that term in this instance to refer to anyone using the OpenStack Neutron code—this doesn’t result in visible new features or functionality. However, this is high-priority work that benefits the entire OpenStack community, and benefits OpenStack overall by enhancing the supportability and stability of the code base over the long term.

Read the entire article here, Making OpenStack Neutron Better for Everyone – OpenStack Blog for VMware

via the fine folks at VMware!