When you are building a data center fabric, should you run a control plane all the way to the host? This is question I encounter more often as operators deploy eVPN-based spine-and-leaf fabrics in their data centers (for those who are actually deploying scale-out spine-and-leaf—I see a lot of people deploying hybrid sorts of networks designed as “mini-hierarchical” designs and just calling them spine-and-leaf fabrics, but this is probably a topic for another day). Three reasons are generally given for deploying the control plane all on the hosts attached to the fabric: faster down detection, load sharing, and traffic engineering. Let’s consider each of these in turn.
Many years ago I attended a presentation by Dave Meyers on network complexity—which set off an entire line of thinking about how we build networks that are just too complex. While it might be interesting to dive into our motivations for building networks that are just too complex, I starting thinking about how to classify and understand the complexity I was seeing in all the networks I touched. Of course, my primary interest is in how to build networks that are less complex, rather than just understanding complexity…
This led me to do a lot of reading, write some drafts, and then write a book. During this process, I ended coining what I call the complexity triad—State, Optimization, and Surface. If you read the book on complexity, you can see my views on what the triad consisted of changed through in the writing—I started out with volume (of state), speed (of state), and optimization. Somehow, though, interaction surfaces need to play a role in the complexity puzzle.
When I think of complexity, I mostly consider transport protocols and control planes—probably because I have largely worked in these areas from the very beginning of my career in network engineering. Complexity, however, is present in every layer of the networking stack, all the way down to the physical. I recently ran across an interesting paper on complexity in another part of the network I had not really thought about before: the physical plant of a data center fabric.
This quote set me to thinking about how efficiency and resilience might interact, or trade off against one another, in networks. The most obvious extreme cases are two routers connected via a single long-haul link and the highly parallel data center fabrics we build today. Obviously adding a second long-haul link would improve resilience—but at what cost in terms of efficiency? Its also obvious highly meshed data center fabrics have plenty of resilience—and yet they still sometimes fail. Why?
One of the difficulties for the average network operator trying to understand their failure rates and reasons is they just don’t have enough devices, or enough incidents, to make informed observations. If you have a couple of dozen switches, it is often hard to understand how often software defects take a device down versus human error (Mean Time Between Mistakes, or MTBM). As networks become larger, however, more information becomes available, and more interesting observations can be made. A recent paper written in conjunction with Facebook uses information from Facebook’s data center fabrics to make some observations about the rate and severity of different kinds of failures—needless to say, the results are fairly interesting.
There is no enterprise, there is no service provider—there are problems, and there are solutions. I’m certain everyone reading this blog, or listening to my podcasts, or listening to a presentation I’ve given, or following along in some live training or book I’ve created, has heard me say this. I’m also certain almost everyone has heard the objections to my argument—that hyperscaler’s problems are not your problems, the technologies and solutions providers user are fundamentally different than what enterprises require.
Let me try to recap some of the arguments I’ve heard used against my assertion.
Tim Schreyack recently presented at NANOG on the topic of building a single source of truth for network automation. Tim joins Tom and Russ in a wide-ranging discussion about single sources of truth, changing the way we see the network, and the changing skills of network engineers.
What is the best way to build a large-scale network—in two words? Ask ten networking folks (engineers, designers, or whatever else), and you’re likely to get the same answer from at least nine: clean abstractions. They might not say the word abstraction, of course; instead, they might say words like build things in modules, using summarization and aggregation to divide the modules up. Or they might say make certain to reduce the failure domain to the smallest you possible can everywhere you can. Or they might say use hierarchical design. These answers are, however, variants of the single word: abstraction.
One of my pet peeves about the network “engineering” world is this: we do too little engineering and too much administration. What brought this to mind this week is an article about Margaret Hamilton about the time she spent working on software development for the Apollo space program, and the lessons she learned about software development there. To wit—
Sounds simple in theory—but it is not in practice.
Let’s take, as an example, replacing some of the capacity in your data center designed on a rather traditional two-layer hierarchy, aggregation, and core.
How many 9’s is your network? How about your service provider’s? Now, to ask the not-so-obvious question—why do you care? Does the number of 9’s actually describe the reliability of the network? According to Jeffery Mogul and John Wilkes, nines are not enough. The question is—while this paper was written for commercial relationships and cloud providers, is it something you can apply to running your own network? Let’s dive into the meat of the paper and find out.
While 5 9’s is normally given as a form of Service Level Agreement (SLA), there are two other measures of reliability a network operator needs to consider—the Service Level Objective (SLO), and the Service Level Indicator (SLI).