Storage is one of the pillar of IT infrastructure which used to be dominated by big and costly storage appliances. As software defined storage becomes commonplace, we now have the opportunity to apply just-in-time principles to the storage world. This is what I will go through in this article.
Provider networks might not seem like much at first glance but they are mighty powerful - they allow you to connect any network (L2 or L3) to your cloud. They are useful if your OpenStack workloads need private access to a legacy system on a specific VLAN. Common usage examples are physical appliances, storage systems, enterprise databases etc. In this post I will show you how to setup a provider network in an OpenStack cloud.