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Stephen Stuart

Stephen Stuart

Stephen is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. His current focus area is developing secure, reliable, scalable software-defined networking (SDN) solutions for enterprise applications. Past efforts at Google include building teams and solutions in SDN for datacenters and WAN, network architecture, and network management software. Prior to Google, he was VP of Engineering for both Switch & Data and MFN, CTO for MIBH, and a Consulting Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation.

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    FAUCET: Deploying SDN in the Enterprise
    Josh Bailey
    ACM Queue, vol. 14 Issue 5 (2016), pp. 54-68
    Preview abstract Since the publication of OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks in 2008, there has been a lot of published work and experience with SDN and OpenFlow in large networks and in datacenters, including at Google. In this article we will discuss an open source SDN controller, FAUCET. FAUCET was created to bring the benefits of SDN to a typical enterprise network and has been deployed in various settings, including the Open Networking Foundation, which runs an instance of FAUCET as their office network. FAUCET delivers high forwarding performance using switch hardware, while enabling operators to add features to their networks and deploy them quickly, in many cases without needing to change (or even reboot) hardware - and interoperates with neighboring non-SDN network devices. View details
    Preview abstract Google has been developing solutions for enterprise networking using SDN, including contributing to the open-source FAUCET project. This talk discusses how the FAUCET approach enables security, development velocity, and other innovation. View details
    BwE: Flexible, Hierarchical Bandwidth Allocation for WAN Distributed Computing
    Björn Carlin
    C. Stephen Gunn
    Enrique Cauich Zermeno
    Jing Ai
    Mathieu Robin
    Nikhil Kasinadhuni
    Sushant Jain
    ACM SIGCOMM 2015 (to appear)
    Preview abstract WAN bandwidth remains a constrained resource that is economically infeasible to substantially overprovision. Hence,it is important to allocate capacity according to service priority and based on the incremental value of additional allocation in particular bandwidth regions. For example, it may be highest priority for one service to receive 10Gb/s of bandwidth but upon reaching such an allocation, incremental priority may drop sharply favoring allocation to other services. Motivated by the observation that individual flows with fixed priority may not be the ideal basis for bandwidth allocation, we present the design and implementation of Bandwidth Enforcer (BwE), a global, hierarchical bandwidth allocation infrastructure. BwE supports: i) service-level bandwidth allocation following prioritized bandwidth functions where a service can represent an arbitrary collection of ows, ii) independent allocation and delegation policies according to user-defined hierarchy, all accounting for a global view of bandwidth and failure conditions, iii) multi-path forwarding common in traffic-engineered networks, and iv) a central administrative point to override (perhaps faulty) policy during exceptional conditions. BwE has delivered more service-efficient bandwidth utilization and simpler management in production for multiple years. View details
    Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network
    Joon Ong
    Amit Agarwal
    Glen Anderson
    Ashby Armistead
    Roy Bannon
    Seb Boving
    Paulie Germano
    Jeff Provost
    Jason Simmons
    Eiichi Tanda
    Jim Wanderer
    Amin Vahdat
    Sigcomm '15, Google Inc (2015)
    Preview abstract We present our approach for overcoming the cost, operational complexity, and limited scale endemic to datacenter networks a decade ago. Three themes unify the five generations of datacenter networks detailed in this paper. First, multi-stage Clos topologies built from commodity switch silicon can support cost-effective deployment of building-scale networks. Second, much of the general, but complex, decentralized network routing and management protocols supporting arbitrary deployment scenarios were overkill for single-operator, pre-planned datacenter networks. We built a centralized control mechanism based on a global configuration pushed to all datacenter switches. Third, modular hardware design coupled with simple, robust software allowed our design to also support inter-cluster and wide-area networks. Our datacenter networks run at dozens of sites across the planet, scaling in capacity by 100x over ten years to more than 1Pbps of bisection bandwidth. View details
    BwE: Flexible, Hierarchical Bandwidth Allocation for WAN Distributed Computing
    Sushant Jain
    Nikhil Kasinadhuni
    Enrique Cauich Zermeno
    C. Stephen Gunn
    Jing Ai
    Björn Carlin
    Mathieu Robin
    Amin Vahdat
    Sigcomm '15, Google Inc (2015)
    Preview abstract WAN bandwidth remains a constrained resource that is economically infeasible to substantially overprovision. Hence, it is important to allocate capacity according to service priority and based on the incremental value of additional allocation. For example, it may be the highest priority for one service to receive 10Gb/s of bandwidth but upon reaching such an allocation, incremental priority may drop sharply favoring allocation to other services. Motivated by the observation that individual flows with fixed priority may not be the ideal basis for bandwidth allocation, we present the design and implementation of Bandwidth Enforcer (BwE), a global, hierarchical bandwidth allocation infrastructure. BwE supports: i) service-level bandwidth allocation following prioritized bandwidth functions where a service can represent an arbitrary collection of flows, ii) independent allocation and delegation policies according to user-defined hierarchy, all accounting for a global view of bandwidth and failure conditions, iii) multi-path forwarding common in traffic-engineered networks, and iv) a central administrative point to override (perhaps faulty) policy during exceptional conditions. BwE has delivered more service-efficient bandwidth utilization and simpler management in production for multiple years. View details
    B4: Experience with a Globally Deployed Software Defined WAN
    Sushant Jain
    Joon Ong
    Subbaiah Venkata
    Jim Wanderer
    Junlan Zhou
    Min Zhu
    Amin Vahdat
    Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Hong Kong, China (2013)
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