OVS Orbit

OVS Orbit

By Ben PfaffTechnology
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OVS Orbit episodes

  • 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.

    35 min
  • 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).

    15 min
  • 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.

    39 min
  • 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

    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.

    40 min
  • 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.

    44 min
  • 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.

    40 min
  • 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.

    51 min
  • 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.

    1 hr 6 min
  • 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.

    43 min
  • OVS 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.

      32 min

    About OVS Orbit

    From the publisher's feed

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