[trout]

This link is basically what Socketplane was working on when they got acquired: https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8951

Basically integrating OVS APIs into Docker so it could use more mature networking code as well as VXLAN forwarding. VXLAN is basically IP encapsulation (a 16-bit ID) that the networking industry has standardized on. It more or less allows for L2 over L3 links. I like to think of it as the next Spanning Tree.

So the unwieldy part is the weight OVS brings as well as the VXLAN encapsulation in software - both of which have momentum towards being more lightweight.

[ghayes]

Could you explain this to someone not as familiar with networking?