Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples. Regards, Roderick. Roderick Beck VP of Business Development United Cable Company www.unitedcablecompany.com<http://www.unitedcablecompany.com> New York City & Budapest rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com 36-70-605-5144 [1467221477350_image005.png]
You can start by taking a look at Openflow which embraces the SDN concept. On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 11:57 AM Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development
United Cable Company
www.unitedcablecompany.com
New York City & Budapest
rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com
36-70-605-5144
[image: 1467221477350_image005.png]
On Thu 5. Dec 2019 at 20:38, Töma Gavrichenkov <ximaera@gmail.com> wrote:
Peace,
On Wed, Dec 4, 2019, 9:26 PM Ishmael Rufus <sakamura@gmail.com> wrote:
You can start by taking a look at Openflow which embraces the SDN concept.
Please do not <edited>
So does anyone still wonder why we have so few women in our field? Real nice, Töma. @moderators, can we have a comment from you please about the acceptability of the language used here? Nick
-- -- Nick
Peace, On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 2:54 PM Nick Morrison <nick@nanocat.net> wrote:
Please do not <edited>
So does anyone still wonder why we have so few women in our field?
Real nice, Töma.
Thank you for highlighting! I totally admit that the language used would be deemed unacceptable for many community members. My sincere apologies for that. I will learn from this mistake. -- Töma
Personally, the way I look to SDN today, as a use case. Saying just "SDN" is an unfair word. While it simply started as someone did not want to buy an expensive router while he can write a script on a server (controller) to program a switch to do what he wants, it drafted alot from this view. Although the hardware got smarter and with some vendors even cheaper, still it will not replace the flexibility of software, quick integration of smart AI controller feedback, flow granularity decisions and in some cases replacement of conventional protocols....etc Not as easy as it seems and comes with compromises Brgds, LG ________________________________ From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> on behalf of Töma Gavrichenkov <ximaera@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 4:12:49 AM To: Nick Morrison <nick@nanocat.net> Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Software Defined Networks Peace, On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 2:54 PM Nick Morrison <nick@nanocat.net> wrote:
Please do not <edited>
So does anyone still wonder why we have so few women in our field?
Real nice, Töma.
Thank you for highlighting! I totally admit that the language used would be deemed unacceptable for many community members. My sincere apologies for that. I will learn from this mistake. -- Töma
Ask 5 experts and you will get at least 8 definitions. It’s a very loosely defined buzzword that encompasses a variety of technologies. It’s the latest ill-defined term following cloud computing. Owen
On Dec 4, 2019, at 09:56 , Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development United Cable Company www.unitedcablecompany.com <http://www.unitedcablecompany.com/> New York City & Budapest rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com <mailto:rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> 36-70-605-5144
"SDN" is a broad brush. Here's a "concrete example" of using software to do interesting network tricks. I'm biased, of course. https://www.fastly.com/blog/building-and-scaling-fastly-network-part-1-fight... https://www.fastly.com/blog/building-and-scaling-fastly-network-part-2-balan... Cheers, Ryan On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 10:58 AM Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development
United Cable Company
www.unitedcablecompany.com
New York City & Budapest
rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com
36-70-605-5144
[image: 1467221477350_image005.png]
SDN allows non-software guys to take down your whole network because they forgot some whitespace in a yaml file. ;P On Wed, 2019-12-04 at 17:56 +0000, Rod Beck wrote: Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples. Regards, Roderick. Roderick Beck VP of Business Development United Cable Company www.unitedcablecompany.com<http://www.unitedcablecompany.com> New York City & Budapest rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com 36-70-605-5144 [1467221477350_image005.png] -- Sajan Parikh e: sajan@parikh.io<mailto:sajan@parikh.io> c: 262.343.5973
So like leaving the HTTP service up on router/switches as a Upper Manager trap =D. ----- Alain Hebert ahebert@pubnix.net PubNIX Inc. 50 boul. St-Charles P.O. Box 26770 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 6G7 Tel: 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.net Fax: 514-990-9443 On 2019-12-04 13:36, Sajan Parikh wrote:
SDN allows non-software guys to take down your whole network because they forgot some whitespace in a yaml file. ;P
On Wed, 2019-12-04 at 17:56 +0000, Rod Beck wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck
VP of Business Development
United Cable Company
www.unitedcablecompany.com <http://www.unitedcablecompany.com>
New York City & Budapest
rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com
36-70-605-5144
1467221477350_image005.png
-- Sajan Parikh e: sajan@parikh.io <mailto:sajan@parikh.io> c: 262.343.5973
On Wed, 04 Dec 2019 17:56:10 +0000, Rod Beck said:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
It's called the "cycle of reincarnation". Way back when, a "router" was a Microvax-II with 2 network cards in it, and everything, down to the packet checksums, was done in software on the Microvax CPU. Then we got "routers" that did a lot of the stuff like checksumming in hardware. Then we went back to software for more advanced features, then the hardware got smart enough to do it. For a while, routers were doing IPv4 support in hardware, and the occasional IPv6 packet got tossed towards the CPU. (That was, of course, once they got smart enough to do something other than "compare first 4 bits == "0100", drop on not-equal". I think a few boxes didn't even check the first 4 bits and assumed that all packets started that way, and hilarity and hijinks ensued.... Lather, rinse, repeat multiple times over the past 4 decades. And now we're seeing "SDN" which just means "Now that the hardware is smarter and doing a lot of the stuff we used to do in software, the CPU has more free capacity and we can do new clever stuff in software that we couldn't do before". It's *NOT TRULY* a software-defined network. If it was, there wouldn't be any hardware support for checksumming etc, because the checksum to use would be done in software so it could be easily replaced if you had reason to use a different checksum algorithm. (Hint - it's as big a crock as "Software Defined Storage" - which just means that it's software doing things like the RAID, erasure encoding, and logical volumes rather than physical volumes, even though the logical volumes are usually really just RAID-0 concatenations of segments of physical volumes. Meanwhile, "software defined radio" really means "the physical hardware is flexible, and software is used to configure it in case you didn't want the standard channel frequencies in the 2.4 and 5ghz bands".
SDN originally meant 'separate the forwarding plane from the control plane, and do wacky stuff with the CP'. It's been applied over the years as a nice buzzwordy marketing term for just about anything that involves software interacting with network hardware in any way. Not correct of course, but that's never stopped anyone from try to sell before. :) On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 12:58 PM Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development
United Cable Company
www.unitedcablecompany.com
New York City & Budapest
rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com
36-70-605-5144
[image: 1467221477350_image005.png]
On 4 Dec 2019, at 18:56, Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com <mailto:rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com>> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Maybe our example from my Fiberhood.nl <http://fiberhood.nl/> company can illustrate. It is the size of two PhD projects in our small research institute spun of as a neighbourhood ISP and smart microgrid. We needed a way to build our wide area network (an internet access provider) AND a supercomputer interconnect to both allow for loops in the network. None of the standard switches like Cisco and Juniper can handle this gracefully. SDN/Openflow, especially P4, allows us to write a few programs in a few weeks that generates the hardware and software for the 120 Gbps and 6 terabit mesh switches for whatever topology of our network. We can buy white label switches for $5000 or our own $800 12x10G FPGA fabric switches or $1000 260x50 Gbps switches. We save a few million in an fiber ISP metro network to 20.000 households with 4x10 Gbps ports. More important, we don’t have to fight (adapt and patch) Cicso and Juniper legacy software and protocols every week for 10 years on switches costing 20 times as much. We can test all our software before we built in mininet in an afternoon on a laptop. We could build a test network with OpenVswitch in on fast off the shelf linux servers with 10G ports. We found the Slimfly topology to be $2000 cheaper per household than all other switch topologies. My ISP WAN network winds up being almost as fast as Cray + AMD new Rome zen 2 supercomputer cluster switch fabric with the investment of three people while saving $2000 per location and a few million in my core datacenters with our own hardware product (similar to a NetFPGA Sume https://netfpga.org/site/#/ <https://netfpga.org/site/#/> with 2000 in use). We moved an academic network out of the lab into a fiber ISP Wan for less than $200.000 while saving $40,000,000. A side effect of building arbitrary topologies is an additional saving of $4,000,000 in cable lengths in a 4km2 naighmerhood fiber rollout. Cheers Merik Voswinkel, Fiberhood Coop Metamorph research institute
SDN is definitely an overloaded and confusing term that is used inconsistently. Here are a few attempts to explain: - “The Road to SDN: An Intellectual History of Programmable Networks” (ACM Queue, December 2013) https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2560327 <https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2560327> - “Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks” (CACM, October 2014) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/papers/sdn-abstractions.pdf <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/papers/sdn-abstractions.pdf> - “From Ethane to SDN and Beyond” (ACM SIGCOMM CCR, October 2019) https://ccronline.sigcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/acmdl19-347.pdf <https://ccronline.sigcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/acmdl19-347.pdf> — Jen
On Dec 4, 2019, at 12:56 PM, Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development United Cable Company www.unitedcablecompany.com <http://www.unitedcablecompany.com/> New York City & Budapest rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com <mailto:rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> 36-70-605-5144
I tell everyone we had SDNs in the 90s. But we called it “expect scripts”. :-) -- TTFN, patrick
On Dec 4, 2019, at 9:41 PM, Jennifer Rexford <jrex@cs.princeton.edu> wrote:
SDN is definitely an overloaded and confusing term that is used inconsistently. Here are a few attempts to explain:
- “The Road to SDN: An Intellectual History of Programmable Networks” (ACM Queue, December 2013) https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2560327 <https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2560327>
- “Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks” (CACM, October 2014) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/papers/sdn-abstractions.pdf <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/papers/sdn-abstractions.pdf>
- “From Ethane to SDN and Beyond” (ACM SIGCOMM CCR, October 2019) https://ccronline.sigcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/acmdl19-347.pdf <https://ccronline.sigcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/acmdl19-347.pdf>
— Jen
On Dec 4, 2019, at 12:56 PM, Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com <mailto:rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com>> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development United Cable Company www.unitedcablecompany.com <http://www.unitedcablecompany.com/> New York City & Budapest rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com <mailto:rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> 36-70-605-5144
There is also a trend for "AI" in SDNs and even cognitive networks, can drop this one here: https://www.infinera.com/blog/centurylink-and-infinera-on-the-path-toward-th... On 5 Dec 2019, at 19:17, Bryan Holloway wrote:
On 12/5/19 6:16 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
I tell everyone we had SDNs in the 90s.
But we called it “expect scripts”.
:-)
-- TTFN, patrick
I miss TCL ...
On 12/5/19 1:46 PM, Jörg Kost wrote:
[External Email]
There is also a trend for "AI" in SDNs and even cognitive networks, can drop this one here: https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.infinera.com_blog_centurylink-2Dand-2Dinfinera-2Don-2Dthe-2Dpath-2Dtoward-2Dthe-2Dcognitive-2Dnetwork_&d=DwIFaQ&c=sJ6xIWYx-zLMB3EPkvcnVg&r=mg7ZI12iUjzVkHaIIAWvbA&m=RTQcDkHVB8y1SC8LSBeBZFiBkMa6hbpjJ7fVuKCrzIE&s=H9hZqgPwx0oIb_80ug_0n-G8aO3q4Fcsauk9qF4BJnk&e=
Cognitive networks? This is where Skynet comes from, right? -- -------------------------------------------- Bruce H. McIntosh Network Engineer II University of Florida Information Technology bhm@ufl.edu 352-273-1066
On 12/5/19 1:17 PM, Bryan Holloway wrote:
On 12/5/19 6:16 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
I tell everyone we had SDNs in the 90s.
But we called it “expect scripts”.
:-)
-- TTFN, patrick
I miss TCL ...
It's not gone. My favorite DVCS - https://www.fossil-scm.org/ - is written in TCL. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
Tcl still exists, though I don't think they use it for this anymore. On 19-12-05 10 h 17, Bryan Holloway wrote:
On 12/5/19 6:16 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
I tell everyone we had SDNs in the 90s.
But we called it “expect scripts”.
:-)
-- TTFN, patrick
I miss TCL ...
I do still use expect(tcl) whole lot at work, it is truly an underappreciated tool ever. On 12/13/19 10:47, Large Hadron Collider wrote:
Tcl still exists, though I don't think they use it for this anymore.
On 19-12-05 10 h 17, Bryan Holloway wrote:
On 12/5/19 6:16 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
I tell everyone we had SDNs in the 90s.
But we called it “expect scripts”.
:-)
-- TTFN, patrick
I miss TCL ...
I (and another programmer, now at Amazon) migrated our automation from TCL/Expect to Python/pexpect. I've had to write code for those portions of Expect that didn't carry over into pexpect. I also had to build a framework that allowed me to do rule-based programming in the same flavor as Expect's "expect" statement, which isn't hard but tedious as all get-out. Maintenance of the code using the framework is head and shoulders better than the same tasks in Expect. Particularly when Cisco makes little changes in their operations as you move up the revision chain. On 12/12/19 6:53 PM, Quan Zhou wrote:
I do still use expect(tcl) whole lot at work, it is truly an underappreciated tool ever.
On 12/13/19 10:47, Large Hadron Collider wrote:
Tcl still exists, though I don't think they use it for this anymore.
On 19-12-05 10 h 17, Bryan Holloway wrote:
On 12/5/19 6:16 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
I tell everyone we had SDNs in the 90s.
But we called it “expect scripts”.
:-)
-- TTFN, patrick
I miss TCL ...
Jen missed another ACM article to which she contributed: - "A Purpose-built Global Network: Google's Move to SDN" (ACM Queue, December 11, 2015, Volume 13, issue 8) A discussion with Amin Vahdat, David Clark, and Jennifer Rexford https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2856460 -Phil On 2019/12/4 9:41 PM, Jennifer Rexford wrote:
SDN is definitely an overloaded and confusing term that is used inconsistently. Here are a few attempts to explain:
- “The Road to SDN: An Intellectual History of Programmable Networks” (ACM Queue, December 2013) https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2560327 <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fqueue.acm.org%2Fdetail.cfm%3Fid%3D2560327&data=02%7C01%7Cpgp%40psu.edu%7C29b36f763ef846a8039d08d7792c9bfe%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637111104814647355&sdata=Oq4mdNTeYXGszO89ahCotNRILCk%2BevKicY%2FBl%2FA5%2BYI%3D&reserved=0>
- “Abstractions for Software-Defined Networks” (CACM, October 2014) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~jnfoster/papers/sdn-abstractions.pdf <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fwww.cs.cornell.edu%2F~jnfoster%2Fpapers%2Fsdn-abstractions.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cpgp%40psu.edu%7C29b36f763ef846a8039d08d7792c9bfe%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637111104814647355&sdata=lU3WbUlS9BLkRgiwq0yTCn6Nn88TOTisZu6QU%2FTKUG4%3D&reserved=0>
- “From Ethane to SDN and Beyond” (ACM SIGCOMM CCR, October 2019) https://ccronline.sigcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/acmdl19-347.pdf <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fccronline.sigcomm.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F10%2Facmdl19-347.pdf&data=02%7C01%7Cpgp%40psu.edu%7C29b36f763ef846a8039d08d7792c9bfe%7C7cf48d453ddb4389a9c1c115526eb52e%7C0%7C0%7C637111104814657348&sdata=PLe7XLNf6YiJ4wcLGLPBJbiE0EuNaCULfJ5%2B8%2BBn7Z0%3D&reserved=0>
— Jen
The term " Software Defined Networks " is open to interpretation. But chapter 1 & 2 of bellow course give a concise idea about general concept around Software Defined Networks. https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:LinuxFoundationX+LFS165x+2T2018/co... Regards Asif On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 11:57 PM Rod Beck <rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com> wrote:
Can someone explain what is all the fuss? SDN is like the latest telecom craze but the articles do a poor job of explaining the advantages. I seek concrete examples.
Regards,
Roderick.
Roderick Beck VP of Business Development
United Cable Company
www.unitedcablecompany.com
New York City & Budapest
rod.beck@unitedcablecompany.com
36-70-605-5144
[image: 1467221477350_image005.png]
participants (23)
-
Alain Hebert -
Asif Shaikat -
Bruce H McIntosh -
Bryan Holloway -
Ishmael Rufus -
Jennifer Rexford -
Jörg Kost -
Large Hadron Collider -
lobna gouda -
merik＠fiberhood.nl -
Miles Fidelman -
Nick Morrison -
Owen DeLong -
Patrick W. Gilmore -
Phil Pishioneri -
Quan Zhou -
Rod Beck -
Ryan Landry -
Sajan Parikh -
Stephen Satchell -
Tom Beecher -
Töma Gavrichenkov -
Valdis Klētnieks