Show notes
Jean Tourrilhes is a networking researcher at HPE Labs who served as the chair of the Open Networking Foundation's OpenFlow standardization working group (the “extensibility” working group) from its inception until 2015. Justin Pettit, who was a founding employee at Nicira and who has continued to work at VMware since it acquired Nicira in 2012, was co-chair of the working group during the same period. Justin and Jean are two of the authors of “SDN and Standards Evolution: a Standards Perspective,” a paper published in IEEE Computer in Nov. 2014. This paper gives a lot of the facts behind the OpenFlow's evolution, but it doesn't talk at all about what worked well and what didn't in the standardization process. This discussion tries to cover that part of the story, with the goal of helping listeners to understand how they might better approach any future standardization processes in the future. Some of the topics covered include:
- Tension between advocates for hardware and software switch implementations.
- The debates behind multiple table support.
- Capabilities aka “table features” aka “table type pattern” support.
- Will increasing flexibility in hardware enable better OpenFlow-like functionality in the future? At what cost?
- Naivete regarding OpenFlow influence over hardware.
- Secretiveness of hardware vendors and the OpenFlow hardware vendor working group.
- The requirement for prototyping new features added to OpenFlow, along with pluses and minuses for the requirement.
- Different categories of switches, beyond “hardware” and “software” classification.
- Interactions with testing and interoperability working group, and difficulties with NDAs on testing results.
- Lack of OpenFlow reference implementation and Open vSwitch de facto in that role.
- Increased power of the working group chair, compared to the IETF.
- What is the future of OpenFlow? Is it dying? Or just entrenched?
- What's a likely successor to OpenFlow? P4? eBPF?