Good and better ways of extracting simplicity

Summary for the impatient

If your solution to a complex problem makes things simpler for you by making it harder for somebody else, you’re probably doing it wrong. I’m looking at you, VXLAN.

Networks: babies vs. men

Prompted by a question from an industry colleague, I started a blog post to describe what I would like a network to be: essentially, network connectivity as a service; and while thinking about it, an analogy came to mind. I think it is quite valid and here it is, as a scene set-up for the follow-up blog post.

Many of today’s networks are like babies – they need constant attention, monitoring, feeding and grooming. We set them up and then poll constantly – have they pooped themselves? are they hungry? tummy cramps? stumbled and fell? poked themselves in the eye with a toy?

What we can not do, is to have a working relationship with our network as if it was a grown-up, where it would offer us a menu of connectivity services, with corresponding service levels attached, via a standardised interface (programmatic, yes), and then set about delivering on these service levels. Naturally, it would monitor itself against the promises made to us, and request necessary external actions, as necessary – add link/CPU/memory capacity, rectify link faults, etc..

And this, coincidentally, is how I would ideally like to have it.

More details in the next post.

Getting the two to tango

In my previous post, I concluded:

…there are things that you just can’t get if you’re “flying high”, and I think that there are some very good synergies that can be had if SDNs could leverage the capabilities present in IP/MPLS transport networks. However, it takes two to tango, and I’ll be curious to see if enough interest materialises from both sides of the fence to make something like this to happen.

After a bit of a think, I come to conclusion that such integration is already quite possible to a certain extent, and likely with only minimal changes on the NVP side.