BGP dynamic routing¶

Problem Description¶

Dragonflow doesn’t support address scope now, nor does it support BGP dynamic routing. BGP dynamic routing in OpenStack can run as a pair of plugin and agent along with Dragonflow deployed. But it could not advertise the route of floating IP correctly. The virtual router in Dragonflow will be viewed as a legacy router by OpenStack Neutron. And Neutron BGP dynamic routing will use the IP address of router gateway as the floating IP’s next-hop if it is in a legacy router. However, the floating IPs in Dragonflow are distributed and can be reached directly on the compute node hosting a given instance. As such, host routes for the floating IP address should advertise external IP address on the compute node as the next-hop instead of the centralized router. This will keep inbound floating IP traffic from encountering the bottleneck of the centralized router.

Meanwhile, running BGP agents which are highly coupled with OpenStack Neutron is not something Dragonflow favors.

Proposed Change¶

Support BGP dynamic routing as a standalone service in Dragonflow. Omit the functionality of address scope for now. Just treat address scope as a logic concept.

Basically, BGP dynamic routing needs to advertise 2 classes of routes in Dragonflow.

1. Host routes for floating IP addresses. Floating IPs in Dragonflow do stateless NAT and exchange packets with external bridge directly. So, the external bridge is where the floating IPs can be accessed from. And the IP address of external bridge should be the next-hop of host route.
2. Prefix routes for directly routable tenant networks with address scopes. If tenant networks are in the same address scope as external network, Neutron router will directly route the packets from them to external network, instead of NAT the packets. This is the functionality of address scope, but it is naturally supported in Dragonflow, thanks to the fact that Dragonflow uses Neutron L3 agents to host the router gateway port. The next-hop of prefix routes should be the IP address of router gateway port. The router gateway port is where the routable tenant networks can be accessed from.

The advertising of prefix routes for tenant networks is not expected to work with distributed SNAT. First, the distributed SNAT should directly route the tenant networks within the same address scope as external network. Second, the distributed SNAT should be able to distinguish duplicated tenant networks IP addresses sourced from the outbound packet. So, further work is needed when both of these two features have been landed.

The BGP dynamic routing in this implementation will act as BGP routers of the entire Dragonflow cluster, which means it is a centralized service. So, all routes will be gathered together and be advertised together.

However, the BGP peer connection can be redundant. So, it is possible to run multiple BGP services in different hosts at the same time. There is benefit to do so. If one host with BGP service is down, other hosts with BGP service can still advertise the routes. This achieves the high availability of BGP dynamic routing. But it is not recommended to run BGP service in every host in a huge cluster. This will create lots of BGP connections to peer BGP router, and increase the load of peer BGP router dramatically.

BGP dynamic routing in OpenStack can’t learn dynamic routes from peer BGP router now. To make things simple, the implementation in this spec will also not consider learning dynamic routes. Only advertising routes will be considered. However, there is no necessary dependency between BGP dynamic routing in OpenStack and in Dragonflow. So future work can be done without waiting BGP in OpenStack.

+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
|    Attribute Name      |               Description                   |
+========================+=============================================+
| id                     |   Identify                                  |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| name                   |   Name of the BGP speaker                   |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| topic                  |   Tenant ID of BGP speaker                  |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| local_as               |   The local autonomous system ID            |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| peers                  |   The BGP peers of this speaker             |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| routes                 | The routes that this speaker will advertise |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| ip_version             |    The IP version of this BGP speaker       |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+

+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
|    Attribute Name      |               Description                   |
+========================+=============================================+
| id                     |   Identify                                  |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| name                   |   Name of the BGP peer                      |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| topic                  |   Tenant ID of BGP peer                     |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| peer_ip                |   IP address of BGP peer router             |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| remote_as              |   The autonomous system ID of BGP peer      |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| auth_type              |   Authentication type of BGP peer           |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
| password               |   Password of BGP peer                      |
+------------------------+---------------------------------------------+

Implementation¶