OVS Orbit

OVS Orbit

By Ben PfaffTechnology
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OVS Orbit episodes

  • Introduction to OVSDB

    This is the second in a series of Open vSwitch tech talks that we are
    starting to run internally at VMware every week or two. This episode is
    particularly about OVSDB, the Open vSwitch Database. It starts out with
    material explaining why OVSDB exists at all, given that there is so much
    other work in databases and in network configuration. Then it moves on
    to what OVSDB is and its basic features, including the features that its
    schemas support. It also discusses the basics of the OVSDB network
    protocol. It concludes with several minutes of questions.

    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.

    54 min
  • RCU in Open vSwitch Userspace

    This is the first in a series of Open vSwitch tech talks that we are
    starting to run internally at VMware every week or two. This episode is
    particularly about read-copy-update,
    or RCU for short, which is a synchronization technique that allows reads
    to be very cheap (almost free), with some memory cost. This talk covers
    reasons why RCU can be preferred over other techniques, such as readers-writer
    locks, and its relationship with lockless synchronization and
    reference counts. It also covers some of the RCU API within OVS (and why
    OVS has its own API instead of using liburcu).

    The ovs-rcu.h
    header from the OVS source repository is useful reading along with this
    episode.

    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.

    37 min
  • Ten Years of Open vSwitch Success and Failure

    This is a talk that I gave at an internal VMware event called "Open
    Source Day" in February. I prepared it as a kind of internal recognition
    of the ACM SOSR conference awarding Open
    vSwitch its Software Systems Award. It goes over a history of Open
    vSwitch and the motivation behind it, factors that led to its success,
    and some of the project's failures and mixed results.

    The accompanying slides are available as PDF, although it is not necessary to
    view them to follow along.

    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
  • Enterprise SDN, with Greg Ferro from Packet Pushers

    Greg Ferro is one of the Packet Pushers, a host of much
    more popular podcasts than this one. Greg's bio says:

    Greg survived 25+ years of Enterprise IT as a network engineer, architect
    and designer. Involved with a wide range of companies in gaming, online,
    finance, carriers, energy and other, he was a team member or leader that
    designed, built and deployed quite a few medium & large solutions for
    well known large companies. He was CCIE#6920 (and a bunch of others) but
    thats not relevant now.

    The conversation in this episode focuses on the relationship between
    virtual switching and enterprise networking. According to Greg,
    microsegmentation is the key selling point for SDN in the enterprise.
    The idea of pulling a whole physical network into a virtual environment,
    which was one of Nicira's use cases, is starting to acquire some currency
    in enterprises, although there's a great deal of stickiness from sales of
    physical hardware firewalls and other appliances:

    "...so the customer says, 'I really like that poop sandwich, can I have
    another one?' and they don't realize that right next to it is a chicken
    sandwich if only they knew to ask for a chicken sandwich, so they get the
    poop sandwich and they go, 'Mmm, tastes just like the last one! Exactly
    what I wanted!'"

    One important aspect of the Nicira vision was agility, the ability to add
    or change networks quickly without involving the networking team.
    According to Greg, this is not yet important to enterprises because they
    lack the belief that it really works:

    "They're too used to being lied to... When you come to them and say,
    'We've got all this agility and speed!' they just at you going, 'Why
    would I need that?' ... They don't trust what they're being told
    because they have a history of getting un-trustable advice."

    Ben and Greg also briefly discuss SD-WAN and NFV. Greg expresses a
    theory that the end of net neutrality will terminate telco interest in
    ONAP and CORD. Greg expresses positivity about hardware with flow-based
    control APIs such as OpenFlow and P4.

    Greg offers an opinion about public cloud in enterprises:

    "I think we're going to see most people go into the public cloud,
    re-engineer, learn cloud principles, and then start to deploy it back.
    When will that happen? When we start to see the legacy IT vendors build
    hyperconverged platforms running things like OpenShift, and you won't
    even know it's OpenShift, it'll just be a private cloud, and
    clicky-clicky, here's an IaaS, here's a VM, here's a storage, here's a
    connection to the Internet, there's my public IP, boom!"

    For more information about Greg, visit etherealmind.com. You can contact
    Greg via Twitter as @EtherealMind. For more
    information about Packet Pushers, visit packetpushers.net.

    For the "reverse" of this podcast, where Greg interviews Ben, see PQ
    138: Inside Open vSwitch.

    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.

    49 min
  • Network Stack as a Service, with Henry Xu from City University of Hong Kong

    Henry Xu is an assistant
    professor in the computer science
    department at the City University
    of Hong Kong, where he leads the NetX Lab. In this episode, we
    discuss the research behind his group's recent paper Network Stack as a Service in
    the Cloud, presented at HotNets
    2017. The paper has the following abstract:

    The tenant network stack is implemented inside the virtual machines in
    today's public cloud. This legacy architecture presents a barrier to
    protocol stack innovation due to the tight coupling between the network
    stack and the guest OS. In particular, it causes many deployment
    troubles to tenants and management and efficiency problems to the cloud
    provider. To address these issues, we articulate a vision of providing
    the network stack as a service. The central idea is to decouple the
    network stack from the guest OS, and offer it as an independent entity
    implemented by the cloud provider. This re-architecting allows tenants
    to readily deploy any stack independent of its kernel, and the provider
    to offer meaningful SLAs to tenants by gaining control over the network
    stack. We sketch an initial design called NetKernel to accomplish this
    vision. Our preliminary testbed evaluation with a prototype shows the
    feasibility and benefits of our idea.

    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
  • Hardware Acceleration on NICs, with Andy Gospodarek from Broadcom

    This episode features Andy Gospodarek, a Principal Engineer at Broadcom,
    where he works as a software architect on the NICs team. This interview,
    recorded at the DPDK summit in San Jose on November 15, 2017, focuses on
    his team's work on offloading flows to Broadcom NICs, using the user's
    choice of the Linux “TC” flow offload API or a Broadcom-specific API.
    Toward the end, he also talks about a different kind of hardware
    acceleration using a “Smart NIC” with a multicore general-purpose CPU
    that can run Open vSwitch or other popular networking software.

    Andy also spoke about acceleration with Smart NICs at Open vSwitch Fall
    Conference 2018. Slides
    and video
    are available.

    You can contact Andy as @gospo on
    Twitter.

    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.

    34 min
  • Open Compute Project Networking, with Andrew "Puck" Ruthven from Catalyst IT

    Andrew Ruthven, aka “Puck”, is a Data Centre Manager at Catalyst IT, a New Zealand open
    source specialist IT company whose services include operating an
    OpenStack based public cloud.

    This episode is based on “Open
    Compute Project, down under”, a talk that Andrew gave at OpenStack
    Sydney, which had the following abstract:

    This talk will review the Open Compute Project, where it came from, where
    things are now and where things are headed. We will cover benefits that
    Open Compute Project hardware provide over the typical server hardware
    that we’re used to. We will discuss how it works for the large scale
    operators, and the issues that affect the small scale operators from the
    perspective of a small scale operator.

    The discussion begins with an introduction to the Open Compute Project
    (OCP) and its history and motivations. Andrew covers challenges in
    bringing the Open Compute Project to New Zealand, which included setting
    up supply and support chains for the hardware. More relevant to our
    podcast focus, in addition to servers, OCP includes hardware for “white
    box” switches and access points, and Andrew talks about how those work
    and how they fit into a data center infrastructure. Andrew also talks
    about the future of OCP and SDN at Catalyst and in New Zealand.

    Toward the end, we digress into a side discussion of how, on the
    commercial side of the industry, hardware is becoming more and more open,
    with OCP as an example, whereas on the consumer side, hardware is
    becoming more and more locked down, and Andrew and Ben offer their
    thoughts on the situation.

    You can find Andrew on Twitter as @puck_. To find out more about Open
    Compute Project, visit the project
    website.

    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.

    30 min
  • What's New in OVN 2.8, with Ben Pfaff from VMware

    This is a recording of a talk given by Ben Pfaff at the OpenStack Summit
    in Sydney on Monday, Nov. 6, with the follow abstract:

    The Open vSwitch (OVS) community recently released version 2.8. The
    release includes updates to both OVS and OVN (Open Virtual Network),
    which provides virtual networking for OVS. This presentation will
    primarily focus on updates to OVN and how OpenStack can use it as a
    backend for OpenStack Neutron. OVN has continued to grow and mature as an
    OpenStack networking solution. Recent additions include HA for L3
    gateways, native DNS support, ACL (security group) logging, and support
    for the OpenStack metadata API. We will also discuss current and future
    developments for OVS and OVN.

    This talk was written up in the OVN
    documentation, so you can follow along with it there if you like.

    Previously, Episode 18 covered the launch of OVN.

    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
  • Routing a Production Enterprise Network with Faucet, with Brad Cowie from WAND

    Brad Cowie is a member of the WAND Network Research Group at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton,
    New Zealand. He is also a core member of the Faucet project which
    develops an open source OpenFlow controller for enterprise networks,
    which he uses to build production OpenFlow networks.

    This episode is a recording of a talk
    that Brad gave at the OpenStack Summit in
    Sydney on Nov. 6, with the following abstract:

    Within the WAND network research group at the University of Waikato, we
    operate a 100% OpenFlow-controlled network for research/teaching/BYOD
    traffic. The access/aggregation layer of this network is provided by
    vendor OpenFlow switches (most running embedded OpenvSwitch with ASIC SDK
    drivers to drive merchant silicon). The core routing for the network is
    provided by a linux server running a high-speed userspace OpenvSwitch
    bridge accelerated by DPDK. The entire network is controlled by our open
    source OpenFlow v1.3 controller, Faucet. We also introduce our
    test-driven methodology for implementing network features in Faucet and
    how this can also be applied to operating a network.

    You may want to view the slides
    that accompany the talk.

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

    OVS Orbit has previously covered Faucet in Episode 45:
    Faucet and OpenFlow at Allied Telesis, Epsiode 33:
    Lightning Talks, and Episode 19: The Faucet SDN
    Controller.

    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.

    42 min
  • In-band Network Telemetry, with Chang Kim from Barefoot Networks

    Chang Kim is an engineer at Barefoot Networks, where he has
    been intimately involved in the design of the P4 domain-specific language for controlling a
    network data plane.

    Whereas the control and management planes in a network system are
    general-purpose software implemented on CPUs, the data plane in a
    high-speed network is typically implemented in an ASIC dedicated to
    packet forwarding. State-of-the-art switching ASICs can handle multiple
    Tbps (and Gpps). Until recently, these ASICs were designed as
    fixed-function devices: they implemented the specific protocols they
    supported in a hardware description language such as Verilog. Now,
    trends in hardware design have converged to make it possible to build
    much more general-purpose networking ASICs. When this happens, some
    language is needed for programming the ASICs. P4 is the leading
    candidate for a cross-platform language for this purpose.

    This episode focuses not on P4 itself but on In-Band Network Telemetry
    (INT), one application of P4. INT is, according to Chang, a
    “low-hanging fruit” application of programmable network data planes,
    which can be conveniently implemented in P4. INT embeds information
    about the conditions experienced by a particular packet traveling through
    the network into the packets themselves. As a packet travels through the
    network, each intermediate switch collects relevant information, such as
    queuing information, arrival or departure timestamps, etc. and adds it to
    the packet. When the packet leaves the network at a sink switch, it
    takes the accumulated information and, optionally, passes it along to a
    collector. (Most applications will not pass every packet's information
    to a switch because that effectively doubles the amount of traffic in the
    network.)

    INT can offer real-time network monitoring information to administrators.
    Its reports can also be archived to set a baseline or for long-term
    storage.

    INT metadata can be integrated into a packet in a variety of ways. The
    per-packet metadata is typically 16 to 20 bytes per hop, which is a
    significant amount of data that cannot easily be fit into existing
    fixed-size fields such as DSCP or PCP. Geneve or NSH options are two
    reasonable places, and the metadata can also be inserted in nonstandard
    places (such as just after an L4 header) as long as the sink switch is
    configured to strip them before passing them along to an end host.

    To encourage industry-wide implementation of interoperable versions of
    INT, Barefoot has made available a specification,
    which includes a working implementation in P4, and released it to the P4
    consortium. The specification will continue to be developed and
    maintained by the new
    P4 Applications Working Group. IETF also has a new In-Situ OAM (ioam)
    working group with related goals.

    To get involved with P4, including the new P4 Applications Working Group,
    please visit p4.org.

    For more OVS Orbit discussion of P4, please see Episode
    11: P4 on the Edge and Episode 9: Adding P4 to OVS with
    PISCES.

    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

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.