Strategies to remove complexity from everyday infrastructure

Transcription

1 Strategies to remove complexity from everyday infrastructure Nils Swart Director, Plexxi Open Network Exchange, Dallas April- 11

2 Why are we still here? Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication Leonardo da Vinci IT infrastructure process map InformaDon inter- reladon complexity Simplicity is hard to deliver - and- maintain Incen5ves to complete a task not to reduce complexity Complexity is not limited to the network 2

3 An Industry of Incrementalists Vendors Endless new products/features Every product has hundreds of legacy features (many of which aren t used) Ever- increasing complexity Quality issues, less stability Compete/Differen5ate on features Feature creep/code Rot Customers Deploy each new solu5on Each solu5on adds complexity and requires opera5onal support Each new protocol/product/feature can be added, but is very difficult to remove Infrastructure Rot The real problem: We only make incremental improvements 3

4 SDN: (re)moving complexity? Before: Where s the complexity? Acquiring Provisioning Deploying Configuring APer: Where s the complexity? Inside The device The system Between Devices Systems Opera5ng Troubleshoo5ng Replacing Inside The device? The system Between Devices Systems Opera5onal lifecycle involves much more than technology alone Opera5ons is where most of the differen5a5on will come from 4

5 The SDN approach How do we solve problems the industry has ignored? Policy Provisioning Bandwidth Engineering No Central Control Edge policy sta5cally- defined in edge device configura5on Difficult to engineer bandwidth per- flow (requires MPLS/TE) No single- point of administra5on and control 5

6 6 On abstraction, trust and DevOps

7 On abstraction, trust and DevOps Point- of- control (config, etc) Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Box- by- box Box- by- box Group / central Input config config Intent AutomaDon Some scrip5ng, mostly manual Templates and scrip5ng (e.g. puppet) Model- 1: The Past (?) Model- 2: Replacement for CLI jockeying Alterna5ve: Explicit trust through delega5on 1. Requires knowledge of intent 2. Requires 2- way abstrac5on down & up (contextualiza5on) Implied, delega5on VerificaDon Manual, line- by- line Some automa5on, line- by- line Implied, delegated Trust Implicit, config done by experts Implicit by limita5on any change to the process requires experts Explicit 7

8 This theme is catching on Abstraction is about programmability If only it were that simple 8

9 How you would explain the network to a non- network person: Like workflow, star9ng with you What a network person is dealing with on a daily basis User / Client Routers internet Front End Web server Back end Applica5on server Load balancers Front End Back end Database Storage Firewalls Switches Database Storage Intent is lost in transla5on 9

10 Abstraction: Find Relationships Understanding Find by analysis Specify by applica5on developer Or do both Describing Portable descrip5on: Affinity Mapping from/to infrastructure implementa5on You ul5mately want to organize the network topology based on the applica5on workloads. Core Agg Access 10

11 Once you know the relationships You can start to reason about rela5onships Qualita5ve is PCI compliance adhered to? Security is segmenta5on completed? Qualita5ve less than 1 SPOFs? Qualita5ve Are these VMs close to storage? In context of full IT infrastructure You can make changes via VM mobility Not everything can be moved (sharing) Database servers Gateways Clusters Core Agg Access 11

12 Missing: lingua franca Convey intent Implementa5on independent Temporal Affinity describing the rela5onship Front End Web server Back end Applica5on server Database Affinity #1 Front end Back- end Backend 1 Backend 2 Backend 3 Affinity #2 Back- end Databases Database instance 1 Database instance 2 Database instance 3 Affinity Link Affinity Airibute Affinity Group 12

13 Using affinity to adapt & control Star5ng with zero affinity informa5on is implied Producer Cloud Provisioning Storage Mgmt APM Infra monitoring Consumer Consumer SDN controller Actor Actor network Producer Closing the feedback loop 13

14 What s next? Affinity Driven Infrastructure This changes the economics of hierarchical, switched networks 14

15 Don t build bigger, build smarter Computa5on. Algorithms. Math. This is SDN Derive network topology and orchestra5on directly from applica5on or tenant configura5on. Deliver high- bandwidth, op5cal interconnect Allocate bandwidth on- demand, where it s needed Maintain bandwidth/loss/latency SLAs Centralized, Controller- based solu5on API- driven, Programmable by design Applica5on Affinity intelligently delivers bandwidth 15

16 Summary Clarity of intent is largely missing today Develop trust in abstrac5on Contextualiza5on reduces complexity SDN is here today 16

17 17