The Evolution of OpenFlow, with Jean Tourrilhes from HPE Labs and Justin Pettit from VMware

Jean Tourrilhes is a networking researcher at HPE Labs who served as the

chair of the Open Networking Foundation's OpenFlow standardization

working group (the “extensibility” working group) from its inception

until 2015. Justin Pettit, who was a founding employee at Nicira and who

has continued to work at VMware since it acquired Nicira in 2012, was

co-chair of the working group during the same period.

Justin and Jean are two of the authors of “SDN

and Standards Evolution: a Standards Perspective,” a paper published

in IEEE Computer in Nov. 2014. This paper gives a lot of the facts

behind the OpenFlow's evolution, but it doesn't talk at all about what

worked well and what didn't in the standardization process. This

discussion tries to cover that part of the story, with the goal of

helping listeners to understand how they might better approach any future

standardization processes in the future.

Some of the topics covered include:

Tension between advocates for hardware and software switch

implementations.

The debates behind multiple table support.

Capabilities aka “table features” aka “table type pattern” support.

Will increasing flexibility in hardware enable better OpenFlow-like

functionality in the future? At what cost?

Naivete regarding OpenFlow influence over hardware.

Secretiveness of hardware vendors and the OpenFlow hardware vendor

working group.

The requirement for prototyping new features added to OpenFlow, along

with pluses and minuses for the requirement.

Different categories of switches, beyond “hardware” and “software”

classification.

Interactions with testing and interoperability working group, and

difficulties with NDAs on testing results.

Lack of OpenFlow reference implementation and Open vSwitch de facto in

that role.

Increased power of the working group chair, compared to the IETF.

What is the future of OpenFlow? Is it dying? Or just entrenched?

What's a likely successor to OpenFlow? P4? eBPF?

You can contact Jean via email as [email protected] and Justin either via

email as [email protected] or on

Twitter as @Justin_D_Pettit.

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.