The Many Paths to SDN
I did a major overhaul of my RIPE 65 SDN presentation prior to MENOG 12 meeting, including a more comprehensive overview of SDN-related technologies sorted by the networking device plane they operate on.
Many paths to SDN
NETCONF, OF-Config (a YANG data model used to configure OpenFlow devices through NETCONF) and XMPP (chat protocol creatively used by Arista EOS) operate at the management plane – they can change network device configuration or monitor its state.
IRS and PCEP (a protocol used to create MPLS-TE tunnels from a central controller) operate on the control plane (parallel to traditional routing protocols), as do numerous BGP-based tools, from well-known Remote Triggered Black Holes to Flowspec (PBR through BGP used by creative network operators like CloudFlare) and BGP-LS (export of link state topology and MPLS-TE data through BGP).
OpenFlow, MPLS-TP and ForCES work on the data plane – they can modify the forwarding behavior of a controlled device or intercept/inject packets.
Have I missed a relevant protocol/technology? Please write a comment!
Really liked that IXP slide deck. I think thats a solid use case. Listened to Feamster talk about one in ATL that they are looking for participants in an IETF86 recording.
I had never even heard of that CloudFlare setup, that pretty neat/brave, bravo. Just checked YouTube and still no sign of your presentation video, bah.
Cheers!
-Brent
Thank you for trying anyway !
Your blog was pointed to me by a friend.
First - thanks for at least mentioning ForCES.
If you were to talk to the ONF folks - we dont exist.
You did miss some things about ForCES.
ForCES is/can be used for south/north and config AND
despite the myth of it being an artifact of history,
it is deployed.
Here's a little intro:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/86/slides/slides-86-sdnrg-2.pdf
cheers,
jamal (ForCES co-chair)
You could now add eAPI from Arista which is a JSON-RPC representation of the CLI as another method that doesn't require you to have a PhD in understanding the schema used by something.
e.g. from python these 5 lines would tell you the interface status of every interface:
..from jsonrpclib import Server
..switch = Server( "https://username:passw0rd@myswitch/eapi/v1" )
..interfaces = switch.runCli( cmds=[ “show interfaces” ] )
..for name, interface in interfaces.items():
....print “Interface”, name, “is”, interface[ “lineProtocol” ]
I'm well aware of eAPI and I love its simplicity (I was talking about it on the update webinar two days ago), but I explicitly decided not to mention vendor-specific mechanisms (no need to tell me how no two NETCONFs are alike :D )
Thanks for the feedback!
Ivan