The Evolution of OpenFlow, with Jean Tourrilhes from HPE Labs and Justin Pettit from VMware

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?

You can contact Jean via email as [email protected] and Justin either via
email as [email protected] or on
Twitter as @Justin_D_Pettit.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode is Drive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper
music is Yeah Ant
featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music is Space
Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.