nanog mailing list archives

RE: questions asked during network engineer interview


From: <adamv0025 () netconsultings com>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 10:53:30 +0100

William Herrin
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2020 8:21 PM

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 9:57 PM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom com>
wrote:
Suffice it to say, to this day, we still don't know what SDN means to
us, hehe.

Hi Mark,

The Software Defined Network concept started as, "Let's use commodity
hardware running commodity operating systems to form the control plane
for our network devices." The concept has expanded somewhat to: "Lets use
commodity hardware running commodity operating systems AS our network
devices." For example, if you build a high-rate firewall with DPDK on Linux,
that's now considered SDN since its commodity hardware, commodity OS
and custom packet handling (DPDK) that skips the OS.

The higher level takeaway would be: 
"Modularity based on abstraction is the way things get done”
− Barbara Liskov

Abstractions -> Interfaces -> Modularity
This applies at the individual device level as well as you described above, 
however I'd say that application of these principles at the network-wide level is also very beneficial to service 
providers, (Device -> Network -> Service -> Product -> Offer).
This vision was first realized by AT&T in their ECOMP framework which (along with Open-O) is now morphed to ONAP. This 
idea has now been adopted by many service providers as well as commercial products.      
  
adam


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