Category: SDN

Every time a new simple programming language is invented, we go through the same predictable cycle:

• Tons of hype;
• Unbounded enthusiasm when people who never worked in target environment realize they could get something simple done in a short time;
• Ever-worsening headaches as the enthusiasts try to get a real job done with the shiny new tool;
• Disappointment;
• A more powerful language is invented to replace the old one.

A few years ago we experienced the same cycle when OpenFlow was the-one-tool-to-bind-them all.

Remember how Nick Buraglio tried to use OpenDaylight to build a small part of SuperComputing conference network… and ended up with a programmable patch panel?

This time he repeated the experiment using Faucet SDN Controller – an OpenFlow controller focused on getting the job done – and described his experience in Episode 101 of Software Gone Wild.

We started with the usual “what problem were you trying to solve” and quickly started teasing apart the architecture and got geekily focused on interesting things like:

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting video chat with David Bombal in which we covered a wide variety of topics including

• What would you do if you started networking today?
• How do you increase the value of your knowledge?
• Networking hasn’t changed in the last 40 years and whatever you learn about networking will still be valid 20 years from now;
• Why should I learn and implement network automation?
• When should I start learning about network automation?

Note: David posted the whole list of topics with timestamps in the pinned comment under the video.

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

I made a statement along these lines in an SD-WAN blog post and related email sent to our SDN and Network Automation mailing list:

The architecture of most SD-WAN products is thus much cleaner and easier to configure than traditional hybrid networks. However, do keep in mind that most of them use proprietary protocols, resulting in a perfect lock-in.

While reading that one of my readers sent me a nice email with an interesting question:

A while ago we did a podcast with Luke Gorrie in which he explained why he’d love to have simple, dumb, and easy-to-work-with Ethernet NICs. What about the other side of the coin – smart NICs with their own CPU, RAM and operating system? Do they make sense, when and why would you use them, and how would you integrate them with Linux kernel?

We discussed these challenges with Or Gerlitz (Mellanox), Andy Gospodarek (Broadcom) and Jiri Pirko (Mellanox) in Episode 99 of Software Gone Wild.

A while ago we published a guest blog post by Christoph Jaggi explaining the high-level security challenges of most SD-WAN solutions… but what about the low-level details?

Sergey Gordeychik dived deep into implementation details of SD-WAN security in his 35C3 talk (slides, video).

TL&DW: some of the SD-WAN boxes are as secure as $19.99 Chinese webcam you bought on eBay.

Remember the Software-Defined Data Centers hype? While I covered SDDC concepts and technologies for years in my webinars and workshops, I never created an introductory webinar on the topic.

That omission has been fixed in late August – SDDC 101 webinar is available as part of free subscription, and as always I started with the seemingly simple question: What problem are we trying to solve?

I long while ago I stumbled upon an excellent resource describing why distributed systems are hard (what I happened to be claiming years ago when OpenFlow was at the peak of the hype cycle ;)… lost it and found it again a few weeks ago.

If you want to understand why networking is hard (apart from the obvious MacGyver reasons) read it several times; here are just a few points:

In recent years Linux networking started evolving at an amazing pace. You can hear about all the cool new stuff at netdev conference… or listen to Episode 94 of Software Gone Wild to get a CliffsNotes version.

Roopa Prabhu, Jamal Hadi Salim, and Tom Herbert joined Nick Buraglio and myself and we couldn’t help diverging into the beauties of tc, and the intricacies of low-latency forwarding before coming back on track and started discussing cool stuff like:

In mid-September I was invited to present at the vNIC 2018 event in Frankfurt, Germany. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get there, but Zoom did a great job … and enabled me to record the talk.

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

What could be better than an SDN product to bring you closer to a networking nirvana? You guessed it – an SDN product using machine learning.

Want to have some fun? The next time your beloved $vendor rep drops by trying to boost his bonus by persuading you to buy the next-generation machine-learning tool his company just released, invite him to watch James Mickens’ Usenix Security Symposium keynote with you.

Hardware vendors are always making their silicon more complex and feature-rich. Is that a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen? We asked Luke Gorrie, the lead developer of Snabb Switch (an open-source user-land virtual switch written in Lua) about his opinions on the topic.

TL&DL version: Give me a dumb NIC, software can do everything else.

If you want to know more, listen to Episode 93 of Software Gone Wild.

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Transport and Network Security Primer and Ethernet Encryption webinars published a high-level introductory article in Inside-IT online magazine describing security deficiencies of SD-WAN solutions based on the work he did analyzing them for a large multinational corporation.

As the topic might be interesting to a wider audience, I asked him to translate the article into English. Here it is…

You probably know my opinion on nerd knobs and the resulting complexity, but sometimes you desperately need something to get the job done.

In traditional vendor-driven networking world, you might be able to persuade your vendor to implement the knob (you think) you need in 3 years by making it a mandatory requirement for a $10M purchase order. In open-source world you implement the knob, write the unit tests, and submit a pull request.

One of my readers asked me a question that came up in his business strategy class:

Why did routers and switches end up being vertically integrated (the same person makes the hardware and the software)? Why didn't they go down the same horizontal path as compute (with Intel making chips, OEMs making systems and Microsoft providing the OS)? Why did this resemble the pre-Intel model of IBM, DEC, Sun…?

Simple answer: because nobody was interested in disaggregating them.