IEEE: Software-defined Networks

[Robert Seastrom]

What I'm saying is that what is being sold as "SDN" is a pipe dream.

We will absolutely get better networks, faster networks, with better methods of controlling them.  It may even be Bladerunner-ific dystopia.  But you won't get the flying cars.

-r

On Dec 11, 2014, at 6:44 PM, Alex Fraser <beatnic at comcast.net> wrote:

> Rob are you saying it will never happen or it can't happen now (with the current state of the art)?
> 
> Rob Seastrom wrote on 12/9/2014 5:00 PM:
>> 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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>> 
> 
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