Anees Shaikh
Anees Shaikh is with the Global Networking team at Google where he works on software systems to support network management, cloud networking, and routing security in Google’s production networks. Prior to joining Google, he was the Chief SDN Architect in the System Networking product group at IBM, and a research lead at the T.J. Watson Research Center working in all three major divisions (software, services, and systems) of IBM Research.
Anees has published widely in the areas of networking, cloud computing, and system management, and has been an invited speaker in numerous industry forums. He has also been active in a number of open source and standards efforts, including ONF, OpenStack, and IETF, as well as helping to found the OpenDaylight and OpenConfig projects.
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A Decentralized SDN Architecture for the WAN
Nitika Saran
Ashok Narayanan
Sylvia Ratnasamy
Ali Al-Shabibi
Ankit Singla
Hakim Weatherspoon
2024 ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM)(2024) (to appear)
Preview abstract
Motivated by our experiences operating a global WAN, we argue that SDN’s reliance on infrastructure external to the data plane has significantly complicated the challenge of maintaining high availability. We propose a new decentralized SDN (dSDN) architecture in which SDN control logic instead runs within routers, eliminating the control plane’s reliance on external infrastructure and restoring fate sharing between control and data planes.
We present dSDN as a simpler approach to realizing the benefits of SDN in the WAN. Despite its much simpler design, we show that dSDN is practical from an implementation viewpoint, and outperforms centralized SDN in terms of routing convergence and SLO impact.
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Experiences with Modeling Network Topologies at Multiple Levels of Abstraction
Martin Pool
Xiaoxue Zhao
17th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI)(2020)
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Network management is becoming increasingly automated,
and automation depends on detailed, explicit representations
of data about both the state of a network, and about an operator’s intent for its networks. In particular, we must explicitly
represent the desired and actual topology of a network; almost all other network-management data either derives from
its topology, constrains how to use a topology, or associates
resources (e.g., addresses) with specific places in a topology.
We describe MALT, a Multi-Abstraction-Layer Topology
representation, which supports virtually all of our network
management phases: design, deployment, configuration, operation, measurement, and analysis. MALT provides interoperability across software systems, and its support for abstraction allows us to explicitly tie low-level network elements to high-level design intent. MALT supports a declarative style that simplifies what-if analysis and testbed support.
We also describe the software base that supports efficient use of MALT, as well as numerous, sometimes painful
lessons we have learned about curating the taxonomy for a
comprehensive, and evolving, representation for topology.
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Preview abstract
Despite remarkable developments in open networking and SDN, a critical element of operating any network, the management plane, remains an afterthought. As the control and data planes open up, users are still firmly locked into a myriad of proprietary CLIs, APIs, and extensions to configure and monitor the network. In this talk, the presenters will describe a new way of managing, monitoring, and testing networking systems that is vendor-independent, comprehensive, and devised by a broad set of network operators collaborating with equipment and software vendors. The technologies in this ecosystem are designed for automated management systems and include open source data models, development tools, management protocols, and reference implementations. With these tools, the industry have an open, end-to-end open architecture that finally brings network management into the modern SDN era.
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Optical Network Control & Management Plane Evolution-A Large Datacenter Operator Perspective
Nancy El-Sakkary
Vijay Vusirikala
OSA Technical Digest, OSA Publishing(2019)
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Legacy management technologies and concepts are a major blocker to efficiently building and operating a large scale optical network. We provide an overview of new, modern device management technologies and discuss deployment and operational efficiencies that they enable.
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Data Models for Optical Devices in Data Center Operator Networks
Nancy El-Sakkary
Vijay Vusirikala
OSA Technical Digest, OSA Publishing(2019)
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Standardized, vendor agnostic data models deliver major operational benefits. OpenConfig has been implemented on multiple platforms and is an ideal data model to take advantage of these benefits. This document provides an overview.
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Optical Zero Touch Networking - A Large Operator Perspective
Nancy El-Sakkary
Vijay Vusirikala
OSA Technical Digest, OSA Publishing(2019)
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A key area of innovation in optical networking has been enabling modern, vendoragnostic APIs on devices. We provide specifics of how these new capabilities enable deployment and operational efficiencies.
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Vendor-neutral Network Representations for Transport SDN
Vinayak Dangui
Vijay Vusirikala
Proc. of Optical Fiber Communication Conference(2016)
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We describe a model-based approach for building a transport SDN platform that uses operator-defined data models to build common APIs for managing multi-vendor optical networks consisting of terminal devices and line systems.
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Bringing SDN to the Management Plane
Networking @Scale, Menlo Park, CA(2015)
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Google’s OpenConfig and the need for a network configuration framework 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.
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Preview 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.
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Virtual Network Diagnosis as a Service
Preview abstract
Today’s cloud network platforms allow tenants to construct sophisticated virtual network topologies among
their VMs on a shared physical network infrastructure.
However, these platforms provide little support for tenants to diagnose problems in their virtual networks.
Network virtualization hides the underlying infrastructure from tenants as well as prevents deploying existing network diagnosis tools. This paper makes a case
for providing virtual network diagnosis as a service in
the cloud. We identify a set of technical challenges in
providing such a service and propose a Virtual Network
Diagnosis (VND) framework. VND exposes abstract
configuration and query interfaces for cloud tenants to
troubleshoot their virtual networks. It controls software
switches to collect flow traces, distributes traces storage, and executes distributed queries for different tenants for network diagnosis. It reduces the data collection
and processing overhead by performing local flow capture and on-demand query execution. Our experiments
validate VND’s functionality and shows its feasibility
in terms of quick service response and acceptable overhead; our simulation proves the VND architecture scales
to the size of a real data center network.
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Meridian: An SDN Platform for Cloud Network Services
Mohammad Banikazemi
David Olshefski
John Tracey
Guohui Wang
IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(2013), pp. 120-127
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As the number and variety of applications and workloads moving to the cloud grows, networking capabilities have become increasingly important. Over a brief period, networking support offered by both cloud service providers and cloud controller platforms has developed rapidly. In most of these cloud networking service models, however, users must configure a variety of network-layer constructs such as switches, subnets, and ACLs, which can then be used by their cloud applications. In this article, we argue for a service-level network model that provides higher- level connectivity and policy abstractions that are integral parts of cloud applications. Moreover, the emergence of the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm provides a new opportunity to closely integrate application provisioning in the cloud with the network through programmable interfaces and automation. We describe the architecture and implementation of Meridian, an SDN controller platform that supports a service-level model for application networking in clouds. We discuss some of the key challenges in the design and implementation, including how to efficiently handle dynamic updates to virtual networks, orchestration of network tasks on a large set of devices, and how Meridian can be integrated with multiple cloud controllers.
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On the Performance Benefits of Multihoming Route Control
Aditya Akella
Bruce Maggs
Srinivasan Seshan
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 16(2008), pp. 91-104
Preview abstract
Multihoming is increasingly being employed by large enterprises and data centers to extract good performance and reliability from their ISP connections. Multihomed end networks today can employ a variety of route control products to optimize their Internet access performance and reliability. However, little is known about the tangible benefits that such products can offer, the mechanisms they employ and their trade-offs. This paper makes two important contributions. First, we present a study of the potential improvements in Internet round-trip times (RTTs) and transfer speeds from employing multihoming route control. Our analysis shows that multihoming to three or more ISPs and cleverly scheduling traffic across the ISPs can improve Internet RTTs and throughputs by up to 25% and 20%, respectively. However, a careful selection of ISPs is important to realize the performance improvements. Second, focusing on large enterprises, we propose and evaluate a wide-range of route control mechanisms and evaluate their design trade-offs. We implement the proposed schemes on a Linux-based Web proxy and perform a trace-based evaluation of their performance. We show that both passive and active measurement-based techniques are equally effective and could improve the Web response times of enterprise networks by up to 25% on average, compared to using a single ISP. We also outline several "best common practices" for the design of route control products.
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