When Open Source Meets Network Control Planes (original) (raw)

The advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN) is opening up interfaces to historically proprietary networking devices, promising improved orchestration and agility, lower cost of operations and, most importantly, a new wave of innovation. Networking and open source have been strange bedfellows in the past, but at the present time, a rich ecosystem is developing around SDN. In this article, we look at the state of open source as it pertains to the SDN stack and discuss its potential role in changing the networking software and hardware landscape. We discuss the availability and maturity of southbound and northbound APIs along the overall impact of SDN to standardization. We then delve into the RouteFlow architecture, an ongoing project to glue together open source IP routing stacks with OpenFlow networks. Along the way, we share some operational experiences of its use at a live Internet exchange (Cardigan Project), concluding that broader production deployments of open source enabled SDN stacks may be not that far away.