LinuxCon + CloudOpen + ContainerCon NA 2015

As containers are being deployed as part of multi tenant clusters, virtual multi layer switches become essential to interconnect containers while providing isolation guarantees. Assigning tenants their own private networks requires stateful network address translation (NAT) implemented in a scalable architecture to expose containers to public networks. Existing virtual switches integrated into the Linux kernel did not support stateful NAT so far. This presentation introduces a new virtual NAT service deployable as container built using existing kernel functionality such as network namespaces, routing rules and Netfilter to provide NAT services to existing virtual switches such as Open vSwitch and the Linux bridge but also the core L3 layer of Linux.