2. Trends and solutions for networks in an NFV/SDN era
• O - Operation,
• M - Maintenance,
• P - Provisioning
3. • PhD theoretical physics
• Professor of Network and System Administration
• EMANICS network of excellence
• CFEngine founder, computer immunology, promise theory
• Industry advisor, researcher, working with SDN leaders
• Web: http://markburgess.org
About me …
4. Some conclusions
• Multi-tenant — self-service systems, built on fabrics
• Fixed and stable infrastructure fabrics
(net+compute+storage)
• Dynamic, virtualized names and services on top
• Get rid of middle-boxes (load-balancers, firewalls)
5. There are no simple answers:
Technology is easy, people are difficult!
6. Table of contents
I. The business challenge
II. The cultural challenge
III.The technical challenge
IV. Infrastructure fabrics
50. Network designed for low density end-points
• New reality:
• High density datacenter (North-South, East-West)
• Internet of Things
• Push networking (UDP)
• TCP brings more security
• Built on top of Ethernet (bus arch)
51. Scaling network communication
• Read/retrieve/service portal (promises)
• Client-server, anycast
• Publish-subscribe (streaming)
• Caching/CDN: fixed addresses not that important
• Signalling (impositions)
• Scales vertically (brute force)
• Fixed addressing important
52. Summary: From impositions to promise thinking
1. Every processing entity in an infrastructure MUST be individually
addressable (SCALE)
2. Remove middle-boxes (COMPLEXITY)
3. Instead of uninvited impositions, get clients to establish a bond
with a service point (KNOWLEDGE)
53. Sharing resources
How does workload affect the
needs for resource sharing?
Where to put workloads and data to
best tell the business story?
54. The failures of vertical network scaling
•Address scaling -> NAT
•NAT -> private addressing
•private addressing -> L2 /LAN thinking
•L2 focus -> tunnels to extend LANs
•tunnels -> dynamic address rewriting
•dynamic addresses -> collapse under complexity
55. SDN is fixated on LAN
• IPv4 a flawed model of LAN/WAN
• WAN/(LAN x 2) + ARP
• Routing AND L2 tunnels
• IPV6
• Peer discovery
• L3 Index service
•Hint (CDN)
56. Bad semantics ( )
L3 subnets confused with host groups
Scalabilty
Summarization
58. Bad dynamics ( )
Abusing L2 tunnelling
Can’t extend a
broadcast group
indefinitely
Tunnels don’t really
simplify navigation,
just make it someone
else’s problem
Tunnels: VxLAN, EVPN (MPLS/BGP)
61. Designed for a sparse hierarchical network
• Designed for North-South traffic model
• Pile weight into single point of failure
• Break end-to-end principle
• Addresses don’t match geography
64. Microservices
Autonomous tenants .. many
autonomous agents rather than
a top down control
Strong vertical integration for
human ownership
Weak horizontal integration for
scale
65. We have to separate
end-point names/addresses
from transport mechanisms
76. Balance exploration against simple targeted outcomes
Automate documentation of intent: policy converges ( )
Watch out for the human storyline ( )
Delegate for tidiness with weak coupling ( )
The future
