Working with YANG Models - A brief intro to 'pyangbind'

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Both the Hawaii IETF meeting (IETF91) and the subsequent meeting we had a few weeks ago in Dallas were somewhat YANG-heavy. Following work to move towards YANG as a standard modelling language for network configuration, and the subsequent IESG statement effectively deprecating SNMP as the way that we present network configuration - the IETF, and especially the routing area, has dived head-first into YANG. Indeed, I’ve been occupied somewhat with some really great collaborative work with a number of awesome engineers from Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Level3, Yahoo!


Almost Two Years On: Where is SDN?

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Almost two years ago I wrote a post on this site entitled Some Initial Thoughts on the SDN. Clearly, since then the SDN concept gained some more legs (and entered a new stage of the hype cycle) - so, where are we right now? Firstly, I think its fair to say that the concept presented by Scott Shenker of having a single centralised computational element controlling COTS OpenFlow-speaking switches has fallen out of favour somewhat (based on the discussions with other network architects, engineers, and implementors that I have had).


Some Initial Thoughts on the Software-Defined Network (SDN).

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At one of the Ericsson R&D days, Professor Scott Shenker - who's an academic at the University of California in Berkeley, presented on a concept that he calls the "software defined network'. Now, if you haven't seen the presentation - it's definitely worth watching (it's on YouTube, here), and provides quite an engaging look at the problem of network scaling from the perspective of academia, and especially in terms of a comparison to the more rigorous disciplines of computer science, like OS design.