IEEE: Software-defined Networks

[Andre Kesteloot]

Thanks Rob, for this touch of reality-based comments.
73
André

On Tue, Dec 9, 2014 at 5:00 PM, Rob Seastrom <rs at seastrom.com> wrote:

>
> Andre Kesteloot <akesteloot at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > [[
> http://theinstitute.ieee.org/static/special-report-software-defined-networks
> ]]
>
> At work we professional cynics often make joking reference to
> "Software Defiled Networks".  People like to talk about magic fairy
> lands where the application signals the network as to how much
> bandwidth it needs and then gets it provisioned on the fly.  The
> unfortunate reality is that the developers have no idea what happens
> on the other side of their API call.  Down that path lies trouble
> tickets that say things like "I asked you for 100 Mbit/second and ping
> is only showing 40 milliseconds.  What's wrong?".
>
> Particularly in IEEE-land, for obvious reasons, they think of SDN in
> terms of layer-2 pipes and OpenFlow.  That's the wrong way to think of
> SDN.  The right way to think of it is in terms of business-as-usual
> networking with database-driven configuration pushing.  For the love
> of God don't separate your control plane from your data plane - yes,
> they did it in SS7, but that's about a bajillion orders of magnitude
> less complex than running an IP network.
>
> It's occasionally useful to be able to make packets flow against
> gravity, such as in load balancing and network monitoring
> applications.  It's a great way to deploy firewall rules across your
> network (and hopefully not shoot yourself in the foot in the process).
> In short, automation tools with humans doing the steering.
>
> In some ways we've been doing "SDN" for years.  BGP-based realtime
> blacklists have been around for over 15 years.  SNMP (paleo-SDN if you
> think of it in the right terms) is closer to 25.  Then there's the
> DOCSIS OAMP interface which has been around for 15 years or so and
> allows the $12/hr phone representitive to provision your cablemodem
> while-u-wait.
>
> In short, ignore the hype.
>
> Layer 3 - It Scales.
>
> -r
>
>
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