OpenWRT as virtual router?

[joolli]

Hi,
I'm wondering whether someone has looked into using OpenWRT as virtual router? It seems like it might be a good candidate. The design has gone through excruciating steps to make it resource sparse, especially regarding memory and it still has so many features that you would normally just expect from an enterprise router/firewall. It's absolutely amazing.

I know that the virtual router is based of the systemvmtemplate; so it might be inefficient on the development side, I dont know... I just thought I'd ask.

[DaanHoogland]

Sounds like a good idea with the caveat that the virtual router provides a host of functionalities that are not particular to routers (user data and password server spring to mind, but there are bound to be more). One might consider it when these are provisioned elsewhere. I like the idea of moving that maintenance burden out of CloudStack.

[joolli]

I know that openwrt can run more software and I think it's even adopting the Alpine package manager and moving away from "opkg". OpenWRT can even run docker and podman.

The OpenWRT team seems to put quite an effort to make the upgrades fast and successful as many devices can be hard for a novice to recover, if it goes bad.

[DaanHoogland]

at the moment you can register an openwrt image as a vnf appliance, @joolli . There are no concrete plans to support it as a VR alternative or otherwise.