MCP enables you to use the OpenStack Octavia service coupled with the Neutron LBaaS driver version 2 to provide advanced load balancing in your OpenStack environment. Octavia acts as a back-end driver for Neutron LBaaS, therefore, all networking requests are handled by the Octavia API. The main advantage of Octavia comparing to just using the Neutron LBaaS driver is that Octavia provides easy on-demand scaling of load balancing services, what makes it an enterprise-class solution.
One of the fundamental components of Octavia is called amphora, a specific entity that can be a virtual machine, a container, or a bare-metal server, that Octavia uses to deliver workload load balancing services. Currently, only virtual machines are supported.
Octavia makes use of the following OpenStack projects that should be set up on your production OpenStack environment:
Octavia API services run on the OpenStack controller nodes. These services can be installed as a cluster or single service. The Octavia Manager services that are Octavia Worker, Octavia Health Monitor, and Octavia Housekeeping run on the gateway node. The clusterization of the Octavia Manager services is currently available as technical preview only.
The certificates that are used for connection to amphora are created
on the Salt Master node and then loaded on the gtw nodes.
If required, you can move the certificates that were originally created
on the gtw01 node to the Salt Master node. For details, see:
MCP Deployment Guide.
Caution
Octavia works with Neutron OVS as a network solution only. OpenContrail is not supported.