Neutron architecture
Neutron is made up of five daemons, as shown in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1: High-level view of Neutron architecture
- neutron-server: The API and primary gateway to Neutron. One must interact with neutron-server to create, list, delete, and manage networks and other network resources.
- neutron-dhcp-agent: Provides DHCP services to DHCP-enabled Neutron subnets. Behind the scenes,
neutron-dhcp-agent
actually usesdnsmasq
, the popular lightweight DHCP server software, within a network namespace. Network namespaces are a feature of the Linux kernel and partition the use of the network, allowing segregation of network resources despite similar IP address ranges. - neutron-l3-agent: Creates Neutron routers. Behind the scenes, Neutron routers are network namespaces with unique routing tables and
iptables
rules. - neutron-metadata-agent: Provides metadata services to instances. The metadata service was popularized by Amazon Web Services and is a non-routable IP address (
169.254.169.254
) that...