episode-22.xml

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<item xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd">
  <title>Benefits of Intent Based Interfaces to IT Infrastructure and Design Problems for Deploying at Scale</title>
  <guests>Dave Lenrow from Huawei</guests>
  <description>
    <p>
      This episode is a recording of a talk that Dave Lenrow gave at the <a
      href="http://platformlab.stanford.edu/seminar-fall-2016.html">Stanford
      Platform Lab Fall Seminar</a> on Dec. 6.  Dave is Chief Architect for
      Next Generation Data Center and Distinguished Engineer at Huawei. He
      participates in a wide variety of open source networking projects
      including ONOS, Open Daylight, OPNFV, opensourcesdn.org, and Open-O. He
      is Chairman of the ONF North Bound Interface (NBI) WG, and a leader in
      the OSSDN Boulder open source intent reference software project. He has
      spent more than 20 years driving innovation in digital technology with an
      emphasis on networks, storage and media.
    </p>

    <p>
      You may want to follow along with Dave's <a
      href="episode-22-slides.pdf">slides</a>, but the talk makes sense without
      them.
    </p>

    <p>
      The talk's abstract is:
    </p>

    <blockquote>
      The ONF’s North Bound Interface Work Group has been advocating a new
      interface to infrastructure controllers based on describing what is
      needed from the system, rather than how the system should provide it.
      We’ve been trying to create a common NBI that would be used by diverse
      developers and operators to create a network effect and resulting strong
      platform and ecosystem. We have been describing this approach as Intent
      Based networking (IBN) and recently published a consensus based document
      describing the operating principles of such a system. We define an intent
      based network system as one with a strict separation of
      application/workload communication intent, from details about how a
      network system implements and fulfills such intent (mappings). It turns
      out that the implementation independent part of the description (the
      intent) has several valuable properties and the promise to share state in
      a way that allows massive scale and high performance. To fulfill the
      promise suggested by this new interface and system architecture, we need
      to get broad collaboration, and we need to solve some difficult system
      and platform design problems. The goal of this talk is to get feedback
      and solicit help from the platform lab in solving some of these problems
      in an open collaboration.  We hope to discuss the role that intent based
      interfaces could serve in building a big control platform in the coming
      years.
    </blockquote>

    <p>
      <a href="https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw/">Keith Winstein</a> introduces
      the talk.
    </p>

    <p>
      The first part of the talk is an introduction to intent-based
      software-defined networking, which Dave summarizes as, ``Don't tell me
      what to do, tell me what you need.''  Intent describes the problem,
      whereas traditional CLI commands describe the solution to the problem.
      In intent, you build a model of the type of workloads you have and let a
      piece of software decide how to implement it.  Dave gives an analogy to
      health care, comparing a request for an aspirin (the status quo in
      networking) to a request to cure a headache (intent-based networking).
      An intent-based system breaks networking into ``intent'' and ``mapping''
      layers, where the mapping layer is the one that resolves the intent into
      protocols and other implementation-level details.
    </p>

    <p>
      One of the big benefits of intent comes from the ability to run more than
      one service.  A lot of existing SDN controllers can support a single
      application.  Attempting to run more than one application tends to cause
      them to interfere with each other, since each one tries to modify switch
      state, such as flow tables, without respecting the other's needs, a
      ``multiple writers'' problem.
    </p>

    <p>
      The second part of the talk, which starts about half an hour in,
      describes a set of open problems.  Many of these reference the <a
      href="http://platformlab.stanford.edu/Seminar%20Talks/Big-Control-Expedition-pres-PL-retreat-June2016-v0.1.pdf">Big
      Control Platform</a>, an ongoing Platform Lab project that seeks to build
      infrastructure for controlling collaborative device swarms.
    </p>

    <p>
      The talk ends with over 20 minutes of questions, beginning at 38:04, from
      Keith Winstein, <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/~mendel/">Mendel
      Rosenblum</a>, <a href="http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~rlantz/">Bob
      Lantz</a>, and others.
    </p>
    
    <p class="attribution">
      OVS Orbit is produced by <a href="mailto:blp@ovn.org">Ben Pfaff</a>.  The
      intro music in this episode is <a
      href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/43098">Drive</a>,
      featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex.  The bumper music is
      <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/42100">Yeah Ant</a>
      featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck.  The outro
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/43005">Space
      Bazooka</a> featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.  All content is licensed under a Creative Commons <a
      href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Attribution 3.0
      Unported (CC BY 3.0)</a> license.
    </p>
  </description>
<pubDate>Sat, 24 Dec 2016 21:43:06 GMT</pubDate>
</item>