Our CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu attended APRICOT, Asia Pacific’s largest international Internet conference, last month in Ho Chi Minh City. In addition to giving presentations on SDN traffic engineering and on segment routing, he spoke with the APNIC organizers about the “Software Transformation of Service Provider Networks.” In the video, he discusses why now is the time for software to take control of the network.
Cengiz asserts that scaling is one of the biggest challenges of operating a network today. Engineers cannot possibly keep up with demands as IP/MPLS is deployed in access and aggregation networks, extending the overall size of the network tenfold to 10,000 or 20,000 routers. The answer is software, but it has to be empowered with the same know-how that engineers have. It must automate what engineers have been doing for many years, but on a much larger scale.
He also explains the importance of telemetry. This includes not only collecting critical information about the network – topology, routes, firewall rules, traffic demands, jitter, performance, delay, interface utilizations, etc. – but also analyzing it, finding issues, and coming up with actionable conclusions to correct problems. All of this can and must be done by software, which then instructs the SDN controller or orchestrator on how to implement the solution.
It’s a scary but exciting proposition, says Cengiz. Hear more from him in the short video:
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