What Applications Want

#SDN #API #devops What is it that applications want, and more importantly, what of those desires can the network fulfill?

That's one of the questions SDN has to answer in order to make SDN relevant in the big picture that is the software-defined data center. What is it, other than forwarding packets and routing between hops and adding a little QoS here and there, can the network offer to applications?

Consider the response of Robert Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks and head of the ONF's Architecture and Framework Working Group, responsible in part for the standardizing of SDN controller northbound APIs to Network World Editor in Chief John Dix's question regarding the role of the northbound API in the SDN architecture:

So the northbound API is how that business application [e.g. Hadoop, OpenStack Nova] talks to the controller to explicitly describe its requirements: I am OpenStack. I want this VM field to talk to this other VM but no other VMs can talk to them, etc. But also give me a view of how loaded the network is so I can make an informed decision on where to put new VMs. So those are two examples of northbound APIs that I think are meaningful for people.

Clarifying the role of software-defined networking northbound APIs

These are two powerful examples of visibility (monitoring of load and conditions) and security (access control, essentially) that are lacking in today's architectures. While people (ops) clearly has visibility, this data is often shuttered off to an APM (application performance monitoring) system, never to be seen again except in the week operations report. Security, of course, is something applications and devops have traditionally accomplished through the use of IP access control lists in the operating system or using application-specific methods to enable/disable access from specific IP addresses and/or ranges.

This, of course, is simply not a sustainable method of managing access in a modern, volatile environment. Such models were designed for fixed, static networks wherein application servers and systems were assigned an IP address at deployment - and they stayed put. Virtualization and cloud computing models break that model and introduce volatility, particularly when elasticity is desired.

Also of importance is the ability to segment out network traffic, to isolate tenants in the parlance of modern cloud architectures. VLAN assignment has traditionally been a very manual process, requiring updates to multiple pieces of network infrastructure along the data path. By enabling a more dynamic and automatic assignment process, tenant traffic can then be assigned specific network performance profiles that aid in meeting service level agreements, as well as routing to services specific to the application such as those providing security at multiple layers of the network stack. This is the concept behind service chaining; dynamically routing traffic through a set of services to provide valuable infrastructure functions on the inbound and outbound data path.

What this implies is not that the controller or the controller "applications" are necessarily providing higher order functions. The controller applications can also be responsible for routing traffic to the appropriate services that provide those higher order functions. The SDN controller and its applications become the primary means of orchestrating traffic through the network, delegating to services hosted in the network those functions that are appropriate for the application.

BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT APPLICATIONS WANT

What's interesting is that VLAN and default gateway configurations are not really application concerns. They are operating system concerns, network device concerns, but they are not, as is becoming the vernacular, domain concerns that are or even should be something the "application" wants. Oh, certainly the application needs an IP address and security policies may dictate that it exchange data only with certain other systems, but that's not what the application wants. That's what it needs. To really start addressing what applications want, we must start evaluating domain concerns that are specific to the application.

An example of this is moving the functionality provided by WCCP (Web Cache Communication Protocol) to an SDN controller application. The cache application on the SDN controller would not necessarily provide the caching service itself, but rather offers the ability to determine if application requests destined for a specific application should be redirected to a caching service which is deployed atop an SDN-enabled (managed) network fabric. The way in which a router today uses WCCP to redirect and route network traffic to a stand-alone web cache translates to an SDN application. In the SDN model, using the northbound API, an application can inform the network it desires the services of a caching system. The SDN controller might then orchestrates the flow of traffic appropriately, chaining services to ensure the inclusion of the cache in the data path.

The interesting thing to watch in the coming months (and probably years, considering the maturation level of SDN in general) will be discovering what "wants" an application has that might be fulfilled using this model. Is it the case that an application will be able to inform an SDN controller it "wants" web application firewall protection for a set of URIs and that from that information the SDN controller will be able to orchestrate (chain) the appropriate services as well as its configuration?

Only time will tell whether this model will mature and turn out to be "the one" but what seems obvious is that success of this model depends entirely on just how application (domain) aware the model will be. Because what applications want are application (domain) services that reside far higher in the stack than what today's SDN models propose to provide and support. Service chaining in conjunction with a robust northbound API seems a feasible means to address that.