Paraglider project released as open source to simplify networking within and across clouds

[divega]

We are thrilled to share that last week during the ONE Summit North America, we launched Paraglider as an open source project under the Linux Foundation.

Paraglider is the result of a collaboration between teams at UC Berkeley's NetSys Lab, Microsoft Azure Networking, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and IBM Cloud, to define a streamlined cloud networking experience that aims at reducing the knowledge necessary for developers and network operators to set up and manage cloud networks for their applications. At a basic level, Paraglider works by deriving network configurations from connectivity requirements at each endpoint rather than following the traditional approach of assembling networks out of cloud-specific low-level building blocks.

Besides the members of the working group, for the official announcement, we also had support from Aarna Networks, Broadcom, Intel, and Uber:

Linux Foundation Launches Paraglider to Reduce Complexity for Developers and Network Operators Withi... Paraglider streamlines cloud networking across multiple cloud providers and simplifies operations within cloud networks. www.linuxfoundation.org

Paraglider offers simple cloud-agnostic constructs to model connectivity and security requirements and transparently supports multi-region and multi-cloud connectivity, meaning that you use the exact same streamlined APIs whether you are establishing a connection within the same cloud and the same region, or across regions and across clouds. Additionally, Paraglider's tag service lets you use semantically meaningful names to refer to individual resources and groups of resources, so that rules can be defined at higher levels of abstraction than IP addresses.

With initial support for connecting virtual machines and entire Kubernetes clusters, automatic provisioning of NSGs/firewall rules, virtual network peerings, and VPN gateways across Azure, GCP, and IBM cloud, Paraglider is still in early stages of development and has a considerable backlog. Nevertheless, the project is getting a very positive reception, and we are excited to continue developing it in the open under the Linux Foundation and to have the opportunity to gather feedback from potential customers and the open source community.

Please head up to our website and GitHub repo or reach out to us on the comments below if you have any questions.