Picking right abstrations for your Network Virtualisation solution

Intro

In my travels around the internets, I got increasingly frustrated by the fact that most descriptions of SDN and network virtualisation solutions dive right down into the specifics of how stuff works. While I’m all for the details, I feel that there is an opportunity here to step back a bit and talk about the abstractions, which is what the end-user will see and deal with. For this post, (and yes, by association) I will talk about the abstractions used by perhaps the most mature network virtualisation solution on the market today.

And yes, this means that I won’t be talking about how that stuff works. I promise. 🙂

Update 4 Aug: Post lightly edited for clarity based on great input from T. Sridhar – Thank You!

Stateless Transport Tunnelling Protocol (STT): a half-step too far?

This morning (our time) @martin_casado tweeted a link to a freshly minted IETF draft – draft-davie-stt-00, that describes a new product of Nicira’s engineering effort (with contributions from Broadcom, Rackspace, eBay, Intel and Yahoo!), “A Stateless Transport Tunneling Protocol for Network Virtualisation (STT)”.

Naturally, I was intrigued by the proposal, and would like to share what I’ve learned and some thoughts about it.