Impact of Controller Failures in Software-Defined Networks
Christoph Jaggi sent me this observation during one of our SD-WAN discussions:
The centralized controller is another shortcoming of SD-WAN that hasn’t been really addressed yet. In a global WAN it can and does happen that a region might be cut off due to a cut cable or an attack. Without connection to the central SD-WAN controller the part that is cut off cannot even communicate within itself as there is no control plane…
A controller (or management/provisioning) system is obviously the central point of failure in any network, but we have to go beyond that and ask a simple question: “What happens when the controller cluster fails and/or when nodes lose connectivity to the controller?”
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