Status Quo of Open Source SDN and IETF Standardization

Status Quo of Open Source SDN and IETF Standardization

by Hariharan Ananthakrishnan, Distinguished Engineer - October 7, 2014

Open source SDN projects like OpenDaylight are offering an open platform for network programmability to network elements such as routers and switches. They rely on standards-based approaches to provide true multi-vendor support. The IETF (and its various working groups) is moving slowly towards creating the standards needed for widespread SDN development and adoption.

OpenDaylight uses topology models, described in YANG, that are getting standardized in the NETMOD and I2RS IETF working groups. It also uses emerging protocol extensions for PCEP and BGP-LS that are being discussed in the PCE and BGP IETF working groups. OpenDaylight, with more than 200 developers, just last week issued Helium, its second software release.

On the other hand, the IETF is progressing more slowly on standardization. PCEP extensions to support statefullness and PCE-initiated LSP are still in draft form. Major routing vendors are finding it difficult to match up the draft updates to their release cycles. As a result of this, customers are challenged to pair up the draft version supported by their routing software with the controller version.

This slowness can cause other issues. Continue reading

Cisco ISR 4000 – Now with more licensing!

This week an Interop NYC, Cisco launched it’s ISR 4000 Series. This is a new approach for them focused on delivering services to your branch offices. Cisco has dubbed this new approach the Intelligent WAN (IWAN) — but before we talk about that, let’s talk about hardware. Those of us that have been paying attention remember that Cisco announced the ISR 4451 at Cisco Live 2013. The 4451 boasts a multi-core CPU architecture that runs the all to familiar by now IOS-XE. It’s 1-2 Gbps of throughput made it a perfect fit for those looking for something in between a 3945 and an ASR1k. Now Cisco that Cisco has brought the rest of the family into the spotlight it all makes sense.


ISR 4k Family

IWAN focuses on a few key fundamentals to get more bang for your buck. And because Cisco has stuffed some serious hardware into the 4k you won’t see the same performance hits you’re all too familiar with in the ISR series. But more on that in a second. Here is Cisco’s break on on the Intelligent WAN…

  • Transport Independence – Providing flexibility when it comes to connectivity. DMVPN can help augment your network with low cost bandwidth for Continue reading

On choice-supportive bias and the need for paranoid optimism

In cognitive science, choice-supportive bias is the tendency to view decisions you have made in the most favorable light. Essentially, we are all hardwired to subconsciously reinforce decisions we have made. We tend to retroactively ascribe positive characteristics to our selections, allowing us to actually strengthen our conviction after the point of decision. This is why we become more resolute in our positions after the initial choice is made.

In corporate culture, this is a powerful driver behind corporate conviction. But in rapidly-shifting landscapes, it can be a dangerous mindset. Consistently finding reasons to reinforce a decision can insulate companies from other feedback that might otherwise initiate a different response. A more productive mindset, especially for companies experiencing rapid evolution, is paranoid optimism.

The need for choice-supportive bias

Choice-supportive bias can actually be a powerful unifier in companies for whom the right path is not immediately obvious. Throughout most of the high-tech space, strategic direction is murky at best. Direction tends to be argued internally before some rough consensus is reached. But even then, the constantly changing technology that surrounds solutions in high-tech means that it can be difficult to stage a lasting rally around a particular direction.

Failing some Continue reading

API-jinks

Dastardly-vi

Network programmability is a very hot topic.  Developers are looking to the future when REST APIs and Python replaces the traditional command line interface (CLI).  The ability to write programs to interface with the network and build on functionality is spurring people to integrate networking with DevOps.  But what happens if the foundation of the programmable network, the API, isn’t the rock we all hope it will be?

Shiny API People

APIs enable the world we live in today.  Whether you’re writing for POSIX or JSON or even the Microsoft Windows API, you’re interacting with software to accomplish a goal.  The ability to use these standard interfaces makes software predictable and repeatable.  Think of an API as interchangeable parts for software.  By giving developers a way to extract information or interact the same way every time, we can write applications that just work.

APIs are hard work though.  Writing and documenting those functions takes time and effort.  The API guidelines from Microsoft and Apple can be hundreds or even thousands of pages long depending on which parts you are looking at.  They can cover exciting features like media services or mundane options like buttons and toolbars.  But each of these Continue reading

INE R&Sv5 Workbook Full-Scale Practice Lab1 made in GNS3

How does the internet work - We know what is networking

Yesterday INE finally added a Full-Scale LAB in their new CCIE Route and Switching blueprint 5 workbook. I realized this morning that you maybe don’t want to spend half of your day (like me) configuring this topology in GNS3. Better to just take it from here and start your lab right away. In my study […]

INE R&Sv5 Workbook Full-Scale Practice Lab1 made in GNS3

DNSSEC: An Introduction

At CloudFlare our mission is to help build a better Internet. Part of this effort includes making web sites faster, more reliable, and more trustworthy. The obvious first choice in protocols to help make websites more secure is HTTPS. CloudFlare’s latest product—Universal SSL—helps web site operators provide a trustworthy browsing experience for their site visitors by giving their site HTTPS support for free. In this blog post we look at another protocol, DNS, and explore one proposal to improve its trustworthiness: DNSSEC.

DNS is one of the pillars of authority on the Internet. DNS is used to translate domain names (like www.cloudflare.com) to numeric Internet addresses (like 198.41.214.163)—it’s often referred to as the “phone book of the Internet”.

DNSSEC is a set of security extensions to DNS that provides the means for authenticating DNS records. CloudFlare is planning to introduce DNSSEC in the next six months, and has brought Olafur Gudmundsson, one of the co-inventors of DNSSEC, on board to help lead the project.

CC BY 2.0 by Eric Fischer

Introduction

The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the oldest and most fundamental components of the modern Internet. As the Continue reading

Go Up or Go Wide

You say, the world doesn't need CCIE anymore with the raise of SDN. I say, we still need CCIE, but those who can adapt. You say, my words are just futile last ditch effort to show the importance of CCIE certification. I say, even I still work for Cisco but I don't work for CCIE program, and I get paid not because of my certifications.

If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine. 
(Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape )

So let's look at the data to make the discussion more fruitful. If you look at Cisco revenue of each product line for the past 5 years, we see there is decline for NGN Routing and Switching business. And yes, Data Center business is growing in fast rate. And Data Center business includes unified computing, next generation fabric, cloud and most Cisco SDN solutions that are available today.


However, if you do a simple math you can see the combined revenue of Routing & Switching business is still close to half Cisco revenue as of today. We are talking about more than 20 billion USD business. It's declining Continue reading

Who named “shellshock”?

Because it's terribly important to cybersec, many are debating the origin of the name "shellshock". I thought I'd write up the definitive answer.

The answer is that it came from this tweet by Andreas Lindh. That's the absolute origin of the term. Andreas made it up himself.



Also, to some extent Davi Ottenheimer deserves some credit for starting the conversation among a bunch of people with his tweet saying "it's not big until there's a logo". Lots of people posted logos as that point.

Also to some extent I deserve some credit for then pimping the "shellshock" name in my blogposts, which received a lot of attention in the early hours of the shellshock crisis. As you can see from the pageview stats below, these posts got a lot of attention. Also, most of the early news stories on "real" news websites referenced me and my posts. Those news sites got the name from me, and I got it from Andreas and nobody else.



I suspect what really helped it along is that when I scanned the Internet for the bug, putting it in everybody's webserver logs. I included a pointer to the "shellshock scan" post in the Continue reading

HP talks SDN at Interop NYC 2014

I generally try to avoid combing my thoughts about presentations, but I have to mention that after sitting down with Glue Networks and their “SDN” presentation, it was truly a breath of fresh air to hear from HP. They went into some details on how they demonstrated the capabilities of their SDN platform. They purposely stretched their network out the limits of what they thought was possible.

On top of that, they spent some time talking about the launch of the very first SDN application ecosystem to market. I have to say, this is a fantastic idea and I’m glad that they brought it to fruition. Not only will the App Store help customers understand the real value behind SDN, as well as discover specific network applications that could help solve problems they’re facing today.

Take a few minutes to listen to Chris Young and Jeff Enters from HP give a fantastic white boarding session on the architecture behind the network they brought to Interop and the specific challenges of building it. Checkout http://hp.com/go/sdn for more info.

Standard TFD Disclaimer

While Cisco and HP were responsible for paying a portion of the travel and lodging costs for me during Continue reading

The little extra that comes with Universal SSL

CC BY 2.0 by JD Hancock

Last Monday we announced our SSL for Free plan users called Universal SSL. Universal SSL means that any site running on CloudFlare gets a free SSL certificate, and is automatically secured over HTTPS.

Using SSL for a web site helps make the site more secure, but there's another benefit: it can also make the site faster. That's because the SPDY protocol, created by Google to speed up the web, actually requires SSL and only web sites that support HTTPS can use SPDY.

CloudFlare has long supported SPDY, and kept up to date with improvements in the protocol. We currently support the most recent version of SPDY: 3.1.

CloudFlare's mission to bring the tools of the Internet giants to everyone is two fold: security and performance. As part of the Universal SSL launch, we also rolled out SPDY for everyone. Many of the web's largest sites use SPDY; now all sites that use CloudFlare are in the same league.

If your site is on CloudFlare, and you use a modern browser that supports SPDY, you'll find that the HTTPS version of your site is now served over SPDY. SPDY allows the Continue reading

Understanding the HP split

HP is splitting itself into "enterprise" and "consumer" companies. Why the split? Isn't the goal of big companies to get bigger? Well, no, that's just the cynical view of companies. The actual goal is to deliver value to stockholders. Splitting delivers value in two ways. The first is that it "exposes" the underlying business. The second is that it avoids dis-economies of scale.

Conglomerates like GE (General Electric) have a problem. While some businesses do well and grow, other businesses fail and shrink. You can't buy stock in the individual components of GE's business you think are growing, you have to take all or none. GE Medical has been growing fast, but you can't invest in it individually.

Thus, big companies frequently spin out such companies, either to divest themselves of the dead weight that isn't growing, or conversely, to let a growing part of these business to fly free without being held back by the deadweight. The fast growing parts of a business aren't inherently better. They tend to also be riskier, meaning that while their stock may surge, they have equal probability of going bankrupt soon.

We can see how this philosophy worked in the case of HP's Continue reading

Bufferbloat and Other Challenges

Vint Cerf wrote a wonderful piece on the problems I’ve been wrestling with the last number of years, called “Bufferbloat and Other Internet Challenges“. It is funny how one thing leads to another; I started just wanting my home network to work as I knew it should, and started turning over rocks. The swamp we’re in is very deep and dangerous, the security problem the worst of all (and given how widespread bufferbloat is, that’s saying something). The “Other Challenges” dwarf bufferbloat, as large a problem as it is.

I gave a lunch talk at the Berkman Center at Harvard in June on the situation and recommend people read the articles by Bruce Schneier and Dan Geer you will find linked there, which is their takes on the situation I laid out to them (both articles were triggered by the information in that talk).

Dan Geer’s piece is particularly important from a policy perspective.

I also recommend reading “Familiarity Breeds Contempt: The Honeymoon Effect and the Role of Legacy Code in Zero-Day Vulnerabilities“, by Clark, Fry, Blaze and Smith, which makes clear to me that our engineering processes need fundamental reform in the face of very Continue reading

Good Ansible News, Everyone

Good_News,_Everyone

There are lots of great things happening at Ansible (and we aren't just talking about the new coffee in the breakroom). We've had a great summer with the hiring a bunch of new Ansible team members, the release of Ansible 1.7.2 and Ansible Tower 2.0. Fall is shaping up to be even better.

-- Inforworld names Ansible one of The best open source data center and cloud software companies.

Continue reading

How Big is That Network?

There is a careful policy path to be followed that encourages continued investment and innovation in national telecommunications-related infrastructure and services, while at the time same time avoiding the formation of market distortions and inefficiencies. What helps in this regulatory process is clear information about the state of the industry itself. One of those pieces of information concerns the market scope of the retail Internet Service Provider sector. To put it another way, how “big” is a particular network? How many customers does it serve? Is its market share increasing or falling?

Write Like You Mean It (Part 1)

old-booksEngineers are supposed to be able to gather information, arrange it in a way that makes sense, and then propose a solution that actually solves the problem at hand — right? So why is it I’m almost constantly astounded at the lack of writing skills in the engineering community? Why don’t engineers know how to write, given the almost complete overlap between the way the engineering process is supposed to work, and the way writing is supposed to work?

I suspect there are a number of reasons, probably foremost of which is that engineers don’t think in the logical chains we like to believe. Engineers are too often caught in the modern “search engine world” — find a thesis, search for a few exports to support your belief, and declare the issue decided. We’re sorely lacking the serious interplay between ideas, the pros and cons way of thinking, that exist in many other intellectual pursuits (though honestly, on a decreasing level every day).

If you need some encouragement, let me put it another way: learning to write will not only enhance your thinking skills as an engineer, it will also advance your career. Seriously.

What to do? Well, we can’t Continue reading

OpEx savings and the ever-present emergence of SDN

Software-defined networking is fundamentally about two things: the centralization of network intelligence to make smarter decisions, and the creation of a single (or smaller number of) administrative touch points to allow for streamlined operations and to promote workflow automation. The former can potentially lead to new capabilities that make networks better (or create new revenue streams), and the latter is about reducing the overall operating costs of managing a network.

Generating revenue makes perfect sense for the service providers who use their network primarily as a means to drive the business. But most enterprises use the network as an enabling entity, which means they are more interested in the bottom line than the top. For these network technology consumers, the notion of reducing costs can be extremely powerful.

But how do those OpEx savings manifest themselves?

OpEx you can measure

When we consider OpEx, it’s easy to point to the things that are measurable: space, power and cooling. So as enterprise customers examine various solutions, they will look at how many devices are required, and then how those devices consume space, power, and cooling. It is relatively straightforward to do these calculations and line up competing solutions. Essentially, you calculate Continue reading

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