Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net

A year and a half ago, Docker networking couldn’t span multiple hosts and used NAT with port mapping to expose container-based services to the outside world. Docker is the hottest Linux container solution these days. Want to know more about it? Matt Oswalt is running Introduction to Docker webinar in a few days. In August 2014 a small startup decided to change all that. Docker bought them before t...

A while ago I watched a Networking Field Day Extra video in which Chris Young and Michael Zayats talked about HP’s open source initiative – they decided to build yet another open networking operating system. Obviously I wanted to know more, reached out to Chris, and we quickly managed to set up an online chat resulting in Episode 48 of Software Gone Wild podcast. Read more …

Nick Buraglio used OpenDaylight and OpenFlow-enabled switches to build a part of the exhibition network of a large international supercomputing conference and was kind enough to talk about his real-life experience in Episode 47 of Software Gone Wild . We covered: Read more …

When I wrote a blog post explaining the difference between centralized control and centralized control plane , John Casey, CEO of CPLANE Networks wrote a comment saying “ yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing. ” It took us a while to get the stars aligned, but finally we managed to sit down and chat about what they’re doing, resulting in Episode 46 of Software Gone Wild . Listen to the podcast

You might be familiar with the idea of using BGP as an SDN tool that pushes forwarding entries into routing and forwarding tables of individual devices, allowing you to build hop-by-hop path across the network (more details in Packet Pushers podcast with Petr Lapukhov ). Researchers from University of Louvain, ETH Zürich and Princeton figured out how to use OSPF to get the same job done and called...

Imagine you’d design your network by documenting the desired traffic flow across the network under all failure conditions, and only then do a low-level design, create configurations, and deploy the network… while being able to use the desired traffic flows as a testing tool to verify that the network still behaves as expected, both in a test lab as well as in the live network. Read mo...

Content providers were using centralized traffic flow optimization together with MPLS TE for at least 15 years (some of them immediately after Cisco launched the early MPLS-TE implementation in their 12.0(5)T release), but it was always hard to push the results into the network devices. PCEP and BGP-LS all changed that – they give you a standard mechanism to extract network topology and install en...

You might remember the great idea David Barroso had last autumn – turn an Arista switch into an Internet edge router (SDN Internet Router – SIR). In the meantime, he implemented that solution in production environment serving high-speed links at multiple Internet exchange points. It was obviously time for another podcast on the same topic . Read more …

A while ago I started discussing the intricate technical details of fibbing (an ingenious way of implementing traffic engineering with traditional OSPF) with Laurent Vanbever and other members of his group, and we decided to record a podcast on this topic. Things never go as planned in a live chat, and we finished talking about another one of his projects – software defined Internet exchange point...

When I asked “ Are there any truly QoS-aware routing protocols out there? ” in one of my SD-WAN posts , Marcelo Spohn from ADARA Networks quickly pointed out that they have one – Dynamic Link-State Routing Protocol. He also claimed that DLSP has no scalability concerns – more than enough reasons to schedule an online chat, resulting in Episode 40 of Software Gone Wild . We...

How do you capture all the flows entering or exiting a data center if your core Nexus 7000 switch cannot do it in hardware? You take an x86 server, load nProbe on it, and connect the nProbe to an analysis system built with ELK stack… at least that’s what Clay Curtis did (and documented in a blog post ). Obviously I wanted to know more about his solution and invited him to the Software Gone Wild po...

With the advent of layer-3 leaf-and-spine data center fabrics, it became (almost) possible to build pure layer-3-only data center networks … if only the networking vendors would do the very last step and make every server-to-ToR interface a layer-3 interface. Cumulus decided to do just that. Read more …

Writing OpenFlow controllers that interact with physical hardware is harder than most people think . Apart from developing a distributed system (which is hard in itself), you have to deal with limitations of hardware forwarding pipelines , differences in forwarding hardware, imprecise abstractions (most vendors still support single OpenFlow table per switch ), and resulting bloated flow tables . R...

Elisa Jasinska , Bob McCouch and I were scheduled to record a NetOps podcast with a major vendor, but unfortunately their technical director cancelled at the last minute. Like good network engineers, we immediately found plan B and focused on Elisa’s specialty: open-source tools. Read more …

What happens when network engineers with strong programming background and focus on open source tools have to implement network automation in a multi-vendor network? Instead of complaining or ranting about the stupidities of traditional networking vendors and CLI they write an abstraction layer that allows them to treat all their devices in the same way and immediately open-source it. Read more &h...

A while ago Chris Young sent me a few questions about network management in the brave new SDN world. I never focused on network management, but I know a few people who do, including Terry Slattery and Matt Oswalt. Interop brought us all together, and we sat down one evening after the presentations to chat about the challenges of monitoring and managing SDN networks. We started with easy things lik...

With all the hype around Segment Routing we said: “let’s chat about it, what could possibly go wrong”. The result: Episode 33 of Software Gone Wild . We didn’t get very far into the technical details, but you might still find the overview useful (or not – do tell me how good or useless it is). Listen to the podcast

When preparing for my Simplifying Application Workload Migration workshop (coming in webinar format in autumn) I tried to find a solution that would allow me to recreate existing enterprise virtual network infrastructure in a cloud environment. Soon I stumbled upon Ravello Systems , remembered hearing about them on a CloudCast.net podcast , and got in touch with them to figure out whether they cou...

When I finished my SDN workshop @ Interop Las Vegas (including a chapter on OpenFlow limitations ), some attendees started wondering whether they should even consider OpenFlow in their SDN deployments. My answer: don’t blame the tool if people use it incorrectly. Two days later, I discovered HP is one of those companies that knows how to use that tool. Read more …

Whenever software switching nerds get together and start discussing the challenges of high-speed x86-based switching, someone inevitably mentions PF_RING, an open-source library that gives you blazingly fast packet processing performance on a Linux server. I started recording a podcast with Luca Deri, the author of PF_RING, but we diverted into discussing ntopng , Luca’s network monitoring softwar...

DNS is a crucial component in modern scale-out application architectures, so when Alex Vayl and Kris Beevers from NSONE contacted me just as I was starting to work on my Active-Active Data Centers presentation, I was more than interested to hear what their solution can do. The result: Episode 29 of Software Gone Wild in which we discussed a number of topics including: Read more …

PF_RING is a great open-source project that enables extremely fast packet processing on x86 servers, so I was more than delighted when Paolo Lucente of the pmacct fame introduced me to Luca Deri , the author of PF_RING. When we started chatting, we couldn’t resist mentioning ntopng , another open-source project Luca is working on. Read more …

VM NIC firewalls have been around for years (they’re also the reason I got my first invitation to the awesome Troopers conference ), but it sounds so much better when you call them Microsegmentation (not the one I talked about @ Troopers this year ). Marketing gimmicks aside, VMware NSX includes an interesting in-kernel stateful firewall , and Brad Hedlund was kind enough to explain the intricacie...

A few days after the Networking Field Day 9 event Nick Buraglio organized a virtual meetup with Brandon Carroll , Brandon Mangold , Bob McCouch and myself, and we discussed the presentations from NEC , Cumulus , Cisco and Brocade . Nick recorded the conversation and so Episode 26 of Software Gone Wild was born. Listen to the podcast

Achieving 40 Gbps of forwarding performance on an Intel server is no longer a big deal - Juniper got to 160 Gbps with finely tuned architecture - but can you do real-time optimization of a million concurrent TCP sessions on that same box at 20 Gbps? Juho Snellman from Teclo Networks explained how they got there in Episode 25 of Software Gone Wild … and you’ll learn a ton of things about radio netw...