OVS Orbit

By Ben Pfaff

Interviews and topics of interest to Open vSwitch developers and users, published twice a month, hosted and produced by Ben Pfaff.... more

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FAQs about OVS Orbit:

How many episodes does OVS Orbit have?

The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.

OVS Orbit episodes:

July 16, 2021 Sneak Preview: VMware Research High Bits, with Lalith Suresh from VMware Research
VMware Research High Bits is a podcast coming soon from VMware's research
group. This episode is a sneak preview of episode 1, with Lalith Suresh.
Lalith is a researcher in the VMware Research Group who specializes in
measurement, design, and implementation of large-scale networked and
distributed systems. Last year, Lalith published a blog
entry with advice on how to build software systems for research, and
then he followed up with a video with more
details. This episode interviews Lalith to learn more about his approach
to building research systems.

To learn more about Lalith's work, visit his VMware
Research webpage or his personal blog Comfortably Geek, where you can also find
his contact information.

VMware Research High Bits is produced by Ben Pfaff. The bumper sound in this
episode is Ben biting into an apple.

...more
35min
April 01, 2021 The Systems Approach, with Bruce Davie, Larry Peterson, and Mark Twain
Bruce Davie and Larry Peterson are the authors of the Systems Approach series of
computer networking textbooks. Mark Twain has been called the greatest
humorist the United States has produced and the father of American
literature. This episode, the first collaboration among these celebrated
authors, incorporates elements of the works of both [1, 2].

For more information on the Systems Approach series, visit systemsapproach.org or follow
the series on substack as systemsapproach or
Twitter as and @SystemsAppr. On Twitter, you
can find Bruce as @_drbruced,
Larry as @_llpete, and Mark as
@MarkTwain.

Bruce and Larry were previously featured in Episode
73: Computer Networks: A Systems Approach.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The outro music
is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.
Fanfares et Simphonies by Jean-Joseph Mouret, performed by Jean-Marie
Leclair, dir. Jean-François Paillard, downloaded via imslp.org,
is licensed under Creative
Commons Zero 1.0 - Non-PD US. The scratch sound effect by Stumber
was downloaded via freesound.org
and licensed under Creative Common
Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). The episode as a whole is
licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0).

...more
15min
March 16, 2021 Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, with Bruce Davie and Larry Peterson
Bruce Davie and Larry Peterson talk about their Systems Approach series of
books on computer networking. These books began with the textbook Computer Networks: A
Systems Approach, published in 1996. After publishing the fifth
edition in 2011, they took their book "open source" by making the text
freely available on
Github under a Creative Common license. Now the original book is
part of a series that also includes "micro-books" on SDN and 5G, with
more books in preparation. In this episode, Bruce and Larry talk about
their motivations and future plans, including trying to rope your host
into writing a book on Open vSwitch.

For more information on the series, visit systemsapproach.org or follow
the series on substack as systemsapproach or
Twitter as and @SystemsAppr. You can find
Bruce on Twitter as @_drbruced and Larry as @_llpete.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
39min
February 27, 2021 The OVSDB Query Optimizer and Key-Value Interface, with Dmitry Yusupov from NVIDIA
Dmitry Yusupov submitted a talk to the Open vSwitch 2020 Fall Conference
that we weren't able to fit into the schedule. This podcast, recorded in
December 2020, is based on the material that Dmitry presented in a video available on YouTube.
The slides for Dmitry's talk are also
available.

The abstract for this talk is:

OVSDB (management protocol RFC 7047) is a fundamental building block of
modern SDN architecture based on OVN/OVS. OVSDB is the key component
that is responsible for efficient scalability of large deployments,
such as 1000+ node Kubernetes clusters when CNI function is OVN based.

OVSDB was originally designed to store configuration for Open vSwitch
daemon, however, it was later extended to be part of OVN architecture,
with added RAFT clustering support and improved scale-out capabilities,
such as efficient scale-out caches.

This talk brings a question of scaling up OVSDB with introduction of
OVSDB Query Optimizer using primary and alternate key indexing. We
will be also looking at OVSDB with Query Optimizer as high-performance
Key-Value API interface and compare it to ETCD.

You can contact Dmitry as @dmitryy on Twitter, or via email
at [email protected].

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
40min
September 01, 2019 Network Service Mesh, with Frederick Kautz and Nikolay Nikolaev
Frederick Kautz and Nikolay Nikolaev are developers on the Network Service Mesh project,
which provides additional networking features for Kubernetes above what
is available from Kubernetes CNI networking implementations.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
44min
July 25, 2019 Long-Term Network Latency, with Nick Buraglio from ESnet
Nick Buraglio works in research and education and service provider
networking, currently at ESnet, the US
Department of Energy's science network, which links sites in the United States and western
Europe. In this podcast, he talks about the role of latency
monitoring in managing a network.

Nick defines the latency that he's talking about:

"When most people think of latency, they think of a ping round-trip time.
That's one useful data point, but we're talking about very low tolerance
and high accuracy latency. You have to have a cellular or GPS clock and
a very strong clock source in the system to be able to track it at this
level. We use that as a very important part of how we manage our
network. That's really what I'm talking about when I talk about
latency."

Nick discusses the perfSONAR
software for monitoring latency over time and for investigating problems
as they occur.

Some basic live monitoring charts and graphs for ESnet are online at MyESnet.

You can contact Nick on Twitter as @forwardingplane or visit
his blog at forwardingplane.net.

Other episodes of OVS Orbit related to monitoring include Episode 46: In-band Network Telemetry and Episode 6: sFlow.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
40min
June 03, 2019 User-Configurable Protocol Support for OVS, or Why Doesn't OVS Support P4?
There are several challenges toward making it easy for users to add
support for new protocols in OVS or, equivalently, adding P4 support to
OVS. This talk, given at the Dagstuhl seminar on programmable data
planes in April 2019, explains the reasons that OVS doesn't already have
these features, what's changing, and likely future directions. The talk
includes considerable discussion with the audience.

An early statement summarizes the message of the talk:

...I think that it's too hard to add support for new protocols and I
think users should be able to do that fairly easily. Currently, it's
really hard--it's hard for me in some cases, and if it's hard for me then
I'm sure it's hard for everyone else.

A little later, this quote covers Ben's philosophy on P4:

Why I like P4 is because of my own personal experience with OpenFlow. At
Nicira when we started out designing OpenFlow, we designed it for very
much a fixed match over basically IPv4 and related fields. We knew from
day 1 that that wasn't good enough, I mean, not to mention existing
protocols like IPv6 that we couldn't handle, but it seemed pretty obvious
that people would want to add their own. Over a couple of years, in my
spare time I started tinkering with ideas for how to write a language for
specifying what protocols a switch supports. It seemed like there were
two possibilities that kept coming up, and yet neither one of them seemed
very good. One was basically based on fixed offsets; people kept
suggesting this, I think maybe even Nick McKeown suggested this at one
point. I kept pointing out that fixed offsets are not going to work very
well because offsets change from one packet to another. The other end of
the spectrum was somebody just provides a program in some general-purpose
language that extracts the headers that you want, and that also seems
pretty unsatisfying because it's really hard to take a general-purpose
program and look at it in terms of some of its emergent properties. You
can't do much with it other than run it. I tried to come up with some
languages that fit in between and then when I first saw one of the drafts
of the P4 specification, I looked at it and said, "I wish I'd written
this." It seems to me that it strikes a really good balance there.

The remainder of the talk covers the possible directions forward for OVS
and flexible protocol support, including eBPF and AF_XDP.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
51min
May 01, 2019 The Faucet Controller at SC18, with Brad Cowie and Richard Sanger from University of Waikato
Brad Cowie and Richard Sanger are members of the WAND Network Research Group at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton,
New Zealand. They are both associated with the Faucet project, which develops an open
source OpenFlow controller for enterprise networks.

The first part of this talk is an introduction to Faucet. The second
part talks about how Faucet became involved in SCinet at
SC18, the supercomputing
conference held annually in Dallas. The talk includes questions from the
audience.

You may wish to view Brad's slides
along with the episode.

For more information on Faucet, visit the Faucet website. You can reach Brad as
gizmoguy on IRC or @nzgizmoguy on Twitter.

Brad Cowie previously spoke with OVS Orbit in Episode 47: Routing a Production
Enterprise Network with Faucet. OVS Orbit previously covered Faucet
in Episode 45: Faucet and OpenFlow at Allied Telesis,
Epsiode 33: Lightning Talks, and Episode 19: The Faucet SDN Controller.

For another take on Faucet at SC18, you can listen to Ivan Pepelnjak
interview Nick Buraglio in Episode
101 of Software Gone Wild.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
1h 6min
April 01, 2019 The Discrepancy of the Megaflow Cache in OVS, with Levente Csikor and Gabor Retvari from Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Levente Csikor and Gabor Retvari from the Budapest University of
Technology and Economics present their talk “The Discrepancy of the
Megaflow Cache in OVS” at the Open vSwitch Fall Conference in San Jose
in December 2018. A few days later, they visited me to have this
discussion for the podcast about their work. This episode is a discussion of their work and their results.

For a synopsis of Levente and Gabor's work, please visit the
OVS conference page. Slides
and video
of their ovscon talk are also available.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

...more
43min
March 01, 2019OVS Hardware Offload, with Simon Horman from Netronome
Simon Horman has been an Open vSwitch contributor and committer since
2010. He currently works for Netronome, where his Open vSwitch work
centers around hardware offload using the "tc" API
integrated into the Linux kernel. This API allows users of Open vSwitch
to transparently obtain better performance: when offload is enabled with
a compatible network card, Open vSwitch works the same way, but faster.

The conversation includes:
Categories of NICs with hardware offload

The architecture of Netronome NICs

How the offload API works

Handling state (such as connection tracking state) in hardware
offload

Limitations of hardware offload, such as memory and other resource
limits

Extending hardware offload to DPDK

The possibility of classification-only offload

Offload interaction with the OVS caching hierarchy

The cost of offload

Kernel politics of the offload API

Applications for offload

Vendor cooperation across the API

Simon Horman is available on Twitter as @horms.

For more information on the offload API, you might want to listen to Episode 50, with Andy Gospodarek from Broadcom.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.
...more
32min

FAQs about OVS Orbit:

How many episodes does OVS Orbit have?

The podcast currently has 75 episodes available.