OpenFlow/SDN Won’t Scale?

I got in a conversation today on Twitter, talking about SDN/SDF (software defined forwarding), which is a new term I totally made up which I use to describe the programmatic and centralized control of forwarding tables on switches and multi-layer switches. The comment was made that OpenFlow in particular won’t scale, which reminded me of an article by Doug Gourlay of Arista talking about scalability issues with OpenFlow.

The argument that Doug Gourlay of Arista had is essentially that OpenFlow can’t keep up with the number of new flows in a network (check out points 2 and 3). In a given data center, there would be tens of thousands (or millions or tens of millions) of individual flows running through a network at any given moment. And by flows, I mean keeping track of stateful TCP connection or UDP pseudo-flows. The connection rate would also be pretty high if you’re talking dozens or hundreds of VMs, all taking in new connections. 

My answer is that yeah, if you’re going to try to put the state of every TCP connection and UDP flow into the network operating system and into the forwarding tables of the devices, that’s Continue reading