attended santa clara meetup for NFV, SDN meeting

[ggnfs000]

I was interested in controller side north bound development but it was about several switch side projects including fd.io, intel's own and BESS projects. I was not interested in details but key takeaway is lot of amazing features integrated but also felt lot of deviation from pure openflow specification. Also noticed by looking at lot of questions being asked, lot of attendees seems raised interesting points (including myself) and also lot of people seems to have no idea what the openflow is.
Looking forward to participate in hands-on workshop for controller projects in December.

[wintermute000]

Nobody is using pure openflow in production. Most are just using it as a way to push entries into FIB but nobody is totally centralizing functions

[ggnfs000]

FIB - forwarding information base?

Yes they said pure SDN has many limitations in terms of performance / scalability. Lot of packets sent back reactive apps over controller that makes the controller almost data plane. Then some of the implementation made the swithes somewhat intelligent, either seem to break away from openflow principle. Possibly need to go back to drawing board instead of patching around.

[wintermute000]

Yep. Read ivan pepljnaks stuff on ipspace.net.
Btw sdn /= openflow.
Just start messing around with python and ansible and RESTAPI hooks. Learn one or two vendors if you want but it's early days and there's so much stuff out there

[burnyd]

I wouldnt put too much effort into openflow.  It has some niche use cases but like what has mentioned before its really not used in production other than some universities and some large cloud providers but neither are betting their business on it.

[NetworkGroover]

Agree with everything mentioned above.  I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I am exposed to it on the customer side - the only time I see a serious push for it is in academia - no where in general production environments (yet).

[ggnfs000]

Yep. Read ivan pepljnaks stuff on ipspace.net.
Btw sdn /= openflow.
Just start messing around with python and ansible and RESTAPI hooks. Learn one or two vendors if you want but it's early days and there's so much stuff out there

if you wanna follow the $$ trail, ODL seems to be the path to follow.

[wintermute000]

I disagree, but to each their own.

In the SP space, its all about PCEP, and orchestration via systems like Tail-F (I think its renamed now?).
In Enterprise, its all about ACI vs NSX vs orchestrated leaf/spines (Arista vs N9k).