neutron-specs/misc/api/provider_networks__provider_.rst

Provider networks (provider)

The ``provider`` extended attributes for networks enable administrative users to specify how network objects map to the underlying networking infrastructure. These extended attributes also appear when administrative users query networks.

To this aim, it extends the network resource by defining a set of attributes prefixed with provider.

These attributes are added to the network resource:

• provider:network_type - Specifies the nature of the physical network mapped to this network resource. Examples are flat, vlan, or gre.
• provider:physical_network - Identifies the physical network on top of which this network object is being implemented. The OpenStack Networking API does not expose any facility for retrieving the list of available physical networks. As an example, in the Open vSwitch plug-in this is a symbolic name which is then mapped to specific bridges on each compute host through the Open vSwitch plug-in configuration file.
• provider:segmentation_id - Identifies an isolated segment on the physical network; the nature of the segment depends on the segmentation model defined by network_type. For instance, if network_type is vlan, then this is a vlan identifier; otherwise, if network_type is gre, then this will be a gre key.

The actual semantics of these attributes depend on the technology back end of the particular plug-in. See the plug-in documentation and the OpenStack Cloud Administrator Guide to understand which values should be specific for each of these attributes when OpenStack Networking is deployed with a particular plug-in. The examples shown in this chapter refer to the Open vSwitch plug-in.

The default policy settings enable only users with administrative rights to specify these parameters in requests and to see their values in responses. By default, the provider network extension attributes are completely hidden from regular tenants. As a rule of thumb, if these attributes are not visible in a GET /networks/<network-id> operation, this implies the user submitting the request is not authorized to view or manipulate provider network attributes.