Category: SDN

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.

I was listening to a very interesting Future of Networking with Fred Baker a long while ago and enjoyed Fred’s perspectives and historical insight until Greg Ferro couldn’t possibly resist the usual bashing of traditional routing protocols and praising of intent-based (or flow-based or SDN or…) whatever.

Here’s what I understood he said around 35:17

After introducing PowerNSX Anthony Burke illustrated how easy it is to use with a Hello, World equivalent: creating a logical switch (VXLAN segment).

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

Want to know more about VMware NSX? We’ll run an NSX-focused event and a NSX Deep Dive workshop in Zurich on April 19th 2018, an overview webinar comparing NSX, ACI and EVPN on March 1st, and a deep dive in VMware NSX architecture later in 2018.

One of my readers sent me this question:

I'm in the process of researching SD-WAN solutions and have hit upon what I believe is a consistent deficiency across most of the current SD-WAN/SDx offerings. The standard "best practice" seems to be 60/180 BGP timers between the SD-WAN hub and the network core or WAN edge.

Needless to say, he wasn’t able to find BFD in these products either.

Does that matter? My reader thinks it does: