Rob Shakir
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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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We're roughly 10 years into the OpenConfig journey. We have implementations in hand from various vendors, and we've gained significant operational experience in the domains of Streaming Telemetry and in Developing Configuration Systems to leverage the developed models. What have we learned? Are the abstractions we've generated the right ones? If not, why? Were we too influenced by the tools and inertia of the time when we made some critical decisions? How do we need to evolve going forward? This discussion is part retrospective/introspective, a candid look at where we've been and what we need to think about as we evolve the next generation of our management (and control) planes. What should we be thinking about as network engineers who write software?
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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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INF566 is a class at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, that covers designing successful protocols in the context of RFC5218. This presentation is a guest lecture that is to be given in the class, particularly focusing on the challenges of using SNMP for visibility into network state.
The lecture describes why we need visibility into state as part of automation frameworks, and highlights why the existing SNMP implementation doesn't meet operational requirements. It provides some background into the problem space that streaming telemetry aims to address, and subsequently covers the lessons learnt from developing the technology - particularly comparing those lessons to those that are described in 5218.
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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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Modern networks have significantly outpaced the monitoring capabilities of SNMP and command-line scraping. Over the last three years we at Google have been working with members of the networking industry via the OpenConfig.net effort to redefine network monitoring. We have now deployed Streaming Telemetry in production to monitor devices from multiple vendors. We will talk about the experience and highlight the open source components we are providing to the community to accelerate industry-wide adoption.
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Over the last 4 years, work has been done in the IETF to introduce a new mechanism for source-based routing to MPLS. Segment Routing (being standardised in the SPRING working group of the IETF) uses stacks of MPLS labels to encode a path through the network as a set of forwarding resources. This lecture covers an introduction to MPLS, looks at the architecture of today's networks using RSVP-TE, and analyses RSVP-TE's success in the context of RFC5218 - a set of observations as to what makes for successful protocols.
With this background, Segment Routing is introduced, and compared to RSVP-TE, concluding with some observations as to its potential success as a new source routing approach within modern networks.
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