Comment 0 for bug 1491317

I have searched and found many past efforts to implement port forwarding in Neutron.
I have found two incomplete blueprints [1], [2] and an abandoned patch [3].

There is even a project in Stackforge [4], [5] that claims
to implement this, but the L3 parts in it seems older then current master.

I have recently came across this requirement for various use cases, one of them is
providing feature compliance with Docker port-mapping feature (for Kuryr), and saving floating
IP's space.
There has been many discussions in the past that require this feature, so i assume
there is a demand to make this formal, just a small examples [6], [7], [8], [9]

The idea in a nutshell is to support port forwarding (TCP/UDP ports) on the external router
leg from the public network to internal ports, so user can use one Floating IP (the external
gateway router interface IP) and reach different internal ports depending on the port numbers.
This should happen on the network node (and can also be leveraged for security reasons).

I think that the POC implementation in the Stackforge project shows that this needs to be
implemented inside the L3 parts of the current reference implementation, it will be hard
to maintain something like that in an external repository.
(I also think that the API/DB extensions should be close to the current L3 reference
implementation)

I would like to renew the efforts on this feature and propose a spec for this to the next release.
And of course if any of the people interested or any of the people that worked on this before
want to join the effort, you are more then welcome to join and comment.

[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/router-port-forwarding
[2] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/fip-portforwarding
[3] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/60512/
[4] https://github.com/stackforge/networking-portforwarding
[5] https://review.openstack.org/#/q/port+forwarding,n,z

[6] https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/75190/neutron-port-forwarding-qrouter-vms/
[7] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/openstack/dev/34307
[8] http://openstack.10931.n7.nabble.com/Neutron-port-forwarding-for-router-td46639.html
[9] http://openstack.10931.n7.nabble.com/Neutron-port-forwarding-from-gateway-to-internal-hosts-td32410.html