A service with an open plugin architecture that manages Neutron advanced services such as routers and load balancers within an OpenStack environment.

Astara is the sanskrit word for carpet. So why name our project carpet?

The original code name for this project was simply "The RUG" which was a reference to a line from the popular film "The Big Lebowski":

That rug really tied the room together, did it not?

The idea is that "The Rug" really ties OpenStack neutron together nicely. We felt it was an apt description so we kept the name.

The code for the Astara project lives in several separate repositories to ease packaging and management:

• Astara - Contains the Orchestration service for managing the creation, configuration, and health of neutron advanced services as virtual network functions.

• Astara Appliance – Supporting software for the Astara virtual network appliance, which is a Linux-based service VM that provides routing and L3+ services in a virtualized network environment. This includes a REST API for managing the appliance via the Astara orchestration service.

• Astara Neutron –  Ancillary subclasses of several OpenStack Neutron plugins and supporting code.

• Astara Horizon - OpenStack Horizon Dashboard code.

Astara is publicly managed through the Astara Launchpad project

The code goes to get reviewed by collaborators and merged at OpenStack Gerrit review

Can be found at docs.akanda.io

Developer quick start guides for making this all work in Devstack Here <docs/source/developer_quickstart.rst>_

Talk to the developers through IRC [#openstack-astara channel on freenode.net] (http://webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=%23openstack-astara&prompt=1&uio=d4)

Astara is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license and is Copyright 2015, OpenStack Foundation