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
Ankit Singla
Hakim Weatherspoon
2024 ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) (2024)
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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The Case for Validating Inputs in Software-Defined WANs
Rishabh Iyer
Isaac Keslassy
Sylvia Ratnasamy
The 23rd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HOTNETS ’24), ACM, Irvine, CA (2024) (to appear)
Preview abstract
We highlight a problem that the networking community has
largely overlooked: ensuring that the inputs to network controllers in software-
defined WANs are accurate. We we show that “incorrect” inputs are a common
cause of major outages in practice and propose new directions to address these.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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