Introduction into tunneling protocols when deploying cloud network for your cloud infrastructure

Cloud network is a hot topic for cloud providers and hosting companies. In basic the concept should enable and allow tenants to create, manage and destroy network typologies on demand for the cloud servers by using cloud open API. That said, we want to allow a tenant to create an isolated virtual layer 2 network with its own IP subnet.

Before going into further details we have to realize that the problem isn't trivial to solve. The difficulty comes from a fact that the existing network that interconnects hypervizors hosts is not very flexible and adaptable for changes. That physical network architecture was build and tune to  allow to handle all traffic from all cloud VM across you cloud deployment. This represent its strength and limitation as it is not flexible enough when it comes to configure and create many isolated virtual layer 2 or layer 3 networks per single tenant. This is exactly the problem that the cloud network promises to resolve.

At the moment there isn't a single standard how to implement a cloud network. Instead, we have 3 different protocols that were proposed: VXLAN, NVGRE, STT [1].

All these protocols relay on the fact that the hypervisor hosts are interconnected  The implementation of the additional features is done by using tunneling mechanisms. All of them implement a L2 in L3 tunnels by using TCP, UDP or IP datagrams.

A short introduction and more explanation how this works can on the screenshots below that were taken from this video:  Video: Cloud Tunnels @ Cloud Mafia ( slies can be found here http://ifup.org/slides/cloud-tunnels/ )

References

1. VXLAN
2. NVGRE
3. STT