Comment by CodingInfra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodingInfra | Hacker News Reader

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This is not mainstream. I forget which OFC this was first presented at, but the Google presenter said they had ~120 employees dedicated to this project. Most companies don't have Google's talent or resources to implement something equivalent. Everyone is quick to reference Google, but can you tell me 2 other commercial customers (non-research) who have deployed OpenFlow at scale - probably not. ;-) Operators who are doing this today are the exception.

Going back to Linux, fact is using Linux on a bare metal switch today is like using Slackware in 1995. The need for a more turn-key Linux distro, with better apps (better routing, telemetry, ...etc) is needed to compliment white box hardware today. For a long time the HW has been the limiting factor since most merchant PFE platforms supported <50k FIB entries. Now with 1M+ (on chip) around the corner, SW quality and scale will need to improve accordingly.

>who have deployed OpenFlow at scale

I didn't say it was OpenFlow everywhere. I meant custom software in some way (i.e. not an off the shelf Juniper/Cisco/whatever). OpenFlow has pretty narrow use cases once you dump reactive flows so it's definitely rare in the wild.

For other customers using whitebox switches with different OS's booted, look at whoever is paying companies like Cumulus/Big Switch.

Probably every OpenStack hosting company uses something like OpenFlow to provide the virtual/tenant/overlay network, so Rackspace et al.

Also see Project Calico for containers, they use the linux kernel as FIB, but obviously they could just as well use OpenFlow to program switches for bare metal machines (which then might run containers).

As deployed, most OpenStack SDNs will use OVS or similar software on top of a (xen,kvm) Hypervisor, connected to some kind of central controller, which just maybe would look kinda like OpenFlow. But all of this is running as an overlay on top of a much more traditional network.

This is very different than a TOR switch or core-router running OpenFlow. Only a few places are running more than a couple thousand VMs in a single SDN, and its nothing like what is being discussed above.

Sure, and OVS (especially with OVN) is pretty capable. (And we haven't even touched OVS DPDK.)

But if you need the big guns there are a ton of OpenStack Neutron plugins, OpenDaylight being one of them (networking-odl) and there are the classical/traditional vendor ones (Cisco, Arista, and so on).

I think the future is very much means this jungle of APIs integrating in whatever tangled ways, and eventually the reliable, robust and sane ones will prevail.

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