SDN in the Management Plane: OpenConfig and Streaming Telemetry

Joshua George
NANOG 64, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Abstract

The networking industry has made good progress in the last few years on developing programmable interfaces and protocols for the control plane to enable a more dynamic and efficient infrastructure. Despite this progress, some parts of networking risk being left behind, most notably network management and configuration. The state-of-the-art in network management remains relegated to proprietary device interfaces (e.g., CLIs), imperative, incremental configuration, and lack of meaningful abstractions.

We propose a framework for network configuration guided by software-defined networking principles, with a focus on developing common models of network devices, and common languages to describe network structure and policies. We also propose a publish/subscribe framework for next generation network telemetry, focused on streaming structured data from network elements themselves.

Research Areas