Ruminating on SOS
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.
First, you create interaction surface when you modularize anything—and you modularize to control state (the scope to set apart failure domains, the speed and volume to enable scaling). Second, adding interaction surfaces adds complexity by creating places where information must be exchanged—which requires protocols and other things. Finally, reducing state through abstraction at an interaction surface is the primary cause of many forms of suboptimal behavior in a control plane, and causes unintended consequences. Since interaction surfaces are so closely tied to state and optimization, then, I added surfaces to the triad, and merged the two kinds of state into one, just state.
I have been thinking through the triad again in the last several weeks for various reasons, and I’m not certain it’s quite right still because I’m not convinced surfaces are really a tradeoff against state and optimization. It seems more accurate to say that state and optimization trade off through interaction surfaces. This does not make it any less of a triad, but it might mean I need to find a little different way to draw it. One way to illustrate it is as a system of moving parts, such as the illustration below.
If you think of the interaction surface between modules 1 and 2—two topological parts, or a virtual topology on top of a physical—then the abstraction is the amount of information allowed to pass between the two modules. For instance, in aggregation the length of the aggregated prefixes, or the aggregated prefix metrics, etc.
When you “turn the crank,” so-to-speak, you adjust the volume, speed (velocity), breadth, or depth of information being passed between the modules—either more or less information, faster or slower, in more places or fewer, or the reaction of the module receiving the state. Every time you turn the crank, however, there is not one reaction but many. Notices optimization 1 will turn in the opposite direction from optimization 2 in the diagram—so turning the crank for 1 to be more optimal will always result in 2 becoming less optimal. There are tens or hundreds of such interactions in any system, and it is impossible for any person to know or understand all of them.
For instance, if you aggregate hundreds of /64’s to tens of /60’s, you reduce the state and optimize by reducing the scope of the failure domain. On the other hand, because you have less specific routing information, traffic is (most likely) going to flow along less-than-optimal paths. If you “turn the crank” by aggregating those same hundreds of /64’s to a 0::0, you will have more “airtight” failure domains or modules, but less optimal traffic flow. Hence …
If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough.
What understanding the SOS triad allows you, combined with a fundamental knowledge of how these things work, is to know where to look for the tradeoffs. Maybe it would be better to illustrate the SOS triad with surfaces at the bottom all the time, acting as a sort of fulcrum or balance point between state and optimization… Or maybe a completely different illustration would be better. This is something for me to think about more and figure out.
Complexity interacts with these interaction surfaces as well, of course—the more complex a system becomes, the more complex the interaction surface within the system become or the more of them you have. A key point in design of any kind is balancing the number of interaction surfaces with their complexity, depth, and breath—in other words, where should you modularize, what should each module contain, what sort of state passed between the modules, where does state pass between the modules, etc. Somehow, mentally, you have to factor in the unintended consequences of hiding information (the first corollary to Keith’s Law, in effect), and the law of leaky abstractions (all nontrivial abstractions leak).
This is a far different way of looking at networks and their design than what you learned in any random certification, and its probably not even something you will find in a college textbook. It is quite difficult to apply when you’re down in the configuration of individual devices. But it’s also the key to understanding networks as a system and beginning the process of thinking about where and how to modularize to create the simplest system to solve a given hard problem.
Going back to the beginning, then—one of the reasons we build such complex networks is we do not really think about how the modules fit together. Instead, we use rules-of-thumb and folk wisdom while we mumble about failure domains and “this won’t scale” under our breath. We are so focused on the individual gears becoming commodities that we fail to see the system and all its moving parts—or we somehow think “this is all so easy,” that we build very inefficient systems with brute-force resolutions, often resulting in mass failures that are hard to understand and resolve.
Sorry, there’s no clear point or lesson here… This is just what happens when I’ve been buried in dissertation work all day and suddenly realize I have not written a blog post for this week… But it should give you something to think about.