Neutron routers are a core component of networking in OpenStack and provide tenants the flexibility to design the network to best suit their application. Floating IPs allow tenants to quickly and programmatically provide direct connectivity to applications through the use of network address translation. Icehouse offers improvements over Havana, including the ability to schedule multiple external networks to a single L3 agent or configure static routes on a router, but limitations still remain. The lack of a high-availability solution for Neutron routers is an issue that persists in Icehouse but is actively being worked on by the community.

In the next chapter, I will discuss OpenStack's load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) solution that allows tenants to quickly scale their application while providing resiliency and availability.