NANOG 90: Pondering Abstractions

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I had the pleasure of giving the keynote presentation at NANOG90 - sharing some thoughts and lessons that we have learnt in the 10 years since we started the OpenConfig project. This was a really enjoyable presentation to put together and give. It balanced being able to look back at what we’ve learnt, and also think about some important lessons that I wanted to share with the networking community.


Published IETF RFCs

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Over the years I have published a number of RFCs in the IETF. They are listed below. As primary author: RFC7684 - OSPFv2 Prefix/Link Attribute Advertisement RFC7777 - Advertising Node Administrative Tags in OSPF RFC7855 - Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Problem Statement and Requirements RFC8355 - Resiliency Use Cases in Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Networks RFC8370 - Techniques to Improve the Scalability of RSVP-TE Deployments RFC8402 - Segment Routing Architecture RFC8660 - Segment Routing with the MPLS Data Plane RFC8662 - Entropy Label for Source Packet Routing in Networking (SPRING) Tunnels RFC8665 - OSPF Extensions for Segment Routing As contributor:


Reimagining Network Devices

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Some reflections on the development of Software-Defined Networking, and how it has impacted the ongoing re-imagining of network devices that OpenConfig, and associated projects has driven. Almost 10 years ago, there was a shift in the IP networking industry. The move towards SDN, and its adoption by hyperscalers as a means to break apart traditional network architectures had set the scene for disruption. The question of “how are we using SDN?


NANOG 86: Emulating Network Topologies in k8s

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Marcus Hines and I spoke at NANOG86 on some of the work that we’ve been doing related to emulating network topologies in Kubernetes, and how this relates to improving network testability. The slides can be found here and there is a video on YouTube.


OpenConfig Public Projects

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There are a number of public projects that we’ve been working on over the last few years in OpenConfig, and published from Google. It seemed like it might be worth giving a brief “hitchhikers guide” that glues together some of the different projects that we’ve published on GitHub. Of course, the initial output of OpenConfig, which has motivated much of this ecosystem is the data models — which are publicly available on GitHub.


IETF98: OpenConfig Observations

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Anees Shaikh and I put together some thoughts that we shared with rtgwg at IETF 98 in Chicago. The slides are linked below.


FutureNet: Model-Driven Automation

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Anees Shaikh and I presented at future:net talking about automation work that we’ve been doing in OpenConfig, and I shared some of the NMS implementation I’ve been working on recently. Slides are linked below.


OpenConfig and IETF YANG Models: Can they converge?

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At IETF96 in Berlin, the chairs of the NETMOD working group, and Operations Area Director (Benoit Claise) published a statement to say “Models need not, and SHOULD NOT, be structured to include nodes/leaves to indicate applied configuration”. Now, this might seem a pretty innocuous statement, but it actually has a number of implications for the data models for network configuration and state that are being produced in the industry.


OpenConfig Interfaces - Some Examples

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I’ve talked a little on this site before about what we’re trying to achieve with OpenConfig. However, one of the observations that it’s easy to make is that YANG models alone don’t really achieve anything in terms of making the network more programmable. To make the network more programmable, we need to have tooling that helps us create instances of those modules, manipulate them, and then serialise the into a format that can be used to transmit data that conforms to the model to a device.


RFC5218, RSVP-TE and Segment Routing.

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After my presentation at UKNOF on SR, Mark Townsley asked me whether I’d be interested in presenting to his class at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, around the thinking (from an ops perspective) of delivering the 5218 concept of “net positive value” through the SR technology, and how the existing protocols that are available might measure up against the criteria that 5218 gives us to consider. We managed to co-ordinate logistics, and I presented to INF566 on Wednesday afternoon, which was a really cool experience.