future:net 2017 Opening Keynote
Network Engineers Can Uncross their Fingers by Emulating Hardware and Software Engineers
Watch Ratul Mahajan, CEO & Co-Founder of Intentionet & Affiliate Professor at University of Washington present the future:net 2017 opening keynote.
Abstract: Network engineering and operations today are highly complex because of vendor heterogeneity, sophisticated intended policies, low-level configuration languages, and rich emergent behaviors. This complexity can leave a wide gap between the engineer’s intent and the network’s actual behavior, and it manifests as network outages, security breaches, and an inability to rapidly evolve the network to changing business needs.
I argue that intent-based networking, which aims to reduce this gap, can be realized by borrowing (and adapting) approaches that have enabled hardware and software engineers to tame their own engineering complexity. I’ll discuss three such approaches: formal validation of behavior, automatic synthesis of low-level constructs from high-level policy specifications, and sophisticated development tools. For each, I’ll sum up the current state of the art, as it applies to networking, and challenges that remain to be solved. Precise and scalable models of the network control plane are a key enabler of all three approaches. Pleasantly, recent work has shown that such models are within reach and readily applicable to real-world networks. I’ll conclude by outlining how these three approaches can be combined to enable highly agile, secure, and reliable networks.