DevOpsQA NJ held our April Meetup on Virtual Networking with Christopher Lijenstolpe as a speaker.  The meetup was held at the new venue, a state-of-the-art office space overlooking NYC,  kindly provided by Ishi Systems.

Christopher, who is a Director of Solutions Architecture at Metaswitch Networks , is also the original architect of Project Calico.  Before joining Metaswitch,  Chris ran networks across the globe including Antarctica.

We got a detailed overview of Project Calico,  which is Apache licensed, pure layer 3 networking solution for container, VM, and hybrid environments.   It’s motto is Scalable, Simple, Open and from the looks of it,  it meets all 3 of those criteria.

Chris started with introducing us to the Standard Virtual Network Model,  and demonstrated the unnecessary complexities of today’s networking systems.  While all these systems are trying to address a multitude of assumed requirements,  the only Real requirement is to establish Communication.  This complexity results in various issues such as fragile connection, poor performance,  inefficient resource utilization and difficulties in troubleshooting.   These issues are significantly magnified when it comes to Containers.

So what is Project Calico?   As Christopher simply explained,  it proposes to build data center like the internet,  utilizing 3 key components –  BGP,  IP and Policy.  In Christopher’s words,  “Project Calico is so simple that it was hard to believe no one thought of it before”.  And that is a real  indicator of a truly innovative solution.   If you would like to try out Project Calico on OpenStack or Docker,  you can read more information at http://projectcalico.org  or contact Christopher directly at [email protected]