As more and more applications are hosted on cloud-based infrastructure, there is a growing need for building networks that are independent of the underlying network hardware. This promise is realized using SDN technologies such as OpenDaylight. However, as a standalone SDN platform, ODL can provide only a subset of the capabilities needed for a cloud infrastructure.
OpenStack can be considered as a collection of services that leverage underlying networks, hypervisor hosts, and storage devices to create an open cloud platform. As introduced in Chapter 1, OpenStack Networking in a Nutshell, Neutron is the OpenStack service that handles network provisioning requests from cloud users. Therefore, in order to leverage ODL in a cloud infrastructure, it must integrate with OpenStack Neutron.