Imagine you’d design your network by documenting the desired traffic flow across the network under all failure conditions, and only then do a low-level design, create configurations, and deploy the network… while being able to use the desired traffic flows as a testing tool to verify that the network still behaves as expected, both in a test lab as well as in the live network.

Content providers were using centralized traffic flow optimization together with MPLS TE for at least 15 years (some of them immediately after Cisco launched the early MPLS-TE implementation in their 12.0(5)T release), but it was always hard to push the results into the network devices.

PCEP and BGP-LS all changed that – they give you a standard mechanism to extract network topology and install end-to-end paths across the network, as Julian Lucek of Juniper Networks explained in Episode 43 of Software Gone Wild.

You might remember the great idea David Barroso had last autumn – turn an Arista switch into an Internet edge router (SDN Internet Router – SIR). In the meantime, he implemented that solution in production environment serving high-speed links at multiple Internet exchange points. It was obviously time for another podcast on the same topic.

A while ago I started discussing the intricate technical details of fibbing (an ingenious way of implementing traffic engineering with traditional OSPF) with Laurent Vanbever and other members of his group, and we decided to record a podcast on this topic.

Things never go as planned in a live chat, and we finished talking about another one of his projects – software defined Internet exchange point (SDX), the topic of Episode 41 of Software Gone Wild.

When I asked “Are there any truly QoS-aware routing protocols out there?” in one of my SD-WAN posts, Marcelo Spohn from ADARA Networks quickly pointed out that they have one – Dynamic Link-State Routing Protocol.

He also claimed that DLSP has no scalability concerns – more than enough reasons to schedule an online chat, resulting in Episode 40 of Software Gone Wild. We didn’t go too deep this time, but you should get a nice overview of what DLSP is and how it works.

::: jump-link

How do you capture all the flows entering or exiting a data center if your core Nexus 7000 switch cannot do it in hardware? You take an x86 server, load nProbe on it, and connect the nProbe to an analysis system built with ELK stack… at least that’s what Clay Curtis did (and documented in a blog post).

Obviously I wanted to know more about his solution and invited him to the Software Gone Wild podcast. In Episode 39 we discussed: