Tech on rob.sh

NANOG 90: Pondering Abstractions

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 22:12:00 -0500

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

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 11:28:50 +0000

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?” was on the lips of vendor and telco executives — and lead to many initiatives in the industry - both those that can be thought of “SDN” and those that were more incremental.

NANOG 86: Emulating Network Topologies in k8s

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 16:00:00 -0800

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

Sun, 17 May 2020 22:15:00 -0800

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

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 09:00:00 +0100

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

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 10:40:00 -0700

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.