Smart Network or Dumb?

Should the network be dumb or smart? Network vendors have recently focused on making the network as smart as possible because there is a definite feeling that dumb networks are quickly becoming a commodity—and it’s hard to see where and how steep profit margins can be maintained in a commodifying market. Software vendors, on the other hand, have been encroaching on the network space by “building in” overlay network capabilities, especially in virtualization products. VMWare and Docker come immediately to mind; both are either able to, or working towards, running on a plain IP fabric, reducing the number of services provided by the network to a minimum level (of course, I’d have a lot more confidence in these overlay systems if they were a lot smarter about routing … but I’ll leave that alone for the moment).

How can this question be answered? One way is to think through what sorts of things need to be done in processing packets, and then think through where it makes most sense to do those things. Another way is to measure the accuracy or speed at which some of these “packet processing things” can be done so you can decide in a more empirical way. The paper I’m looking at today, by Anirudh et al., takes both of these paths in order to create a baseline “rule of thumb” about where to place packet processing functionality in a network.

Sivaraman, Anirudh, Thomas Mason, Aurojit Panda, Ravi Netravali, and Sai Anirudh Kondaveeti. “Network Architecture in the Age of Programmability.” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 50, no. 1 (March 23, 2020): 38–44. https://doi.org/10.1145/3390251.3390257.

The authors consider six different “things” networks need to be able to do: measurement, resource management, deep packet inspection, network security, network virtualization, and application acceleration. The first of these they measure by setting introducing errors into a network and measuring the dropped packet rate using various edge and in-network measurement tools. What they found was in-network measurement has a lower error rate, particularly as time scales become shorter. For instance, Pingmesh, a packet loss measurement tool that runs on hosts, is useful for measuring packet loss in the minutes—but in-network telemetry can often measure packet loss in the seconds or milliseconds. They observe that in-network telemetry of all kinds (not just packet loss) appears to be more accurate when application performance is more important—so they argue telemetry largely belongs in the network.

Resource management, such as determining which path to take, or how quickly to transmit packets (setting the window size for TCP or QUIC, for instance), is traditionally performed entirely on hosts. The authors, however, note that effective resource management requires accurate telemetry information about flows, link utilization, etc.—and these things are best performed in-network rather than on hosts. For resource management, then, they prefer a hybrid edge/in-network approach.

The argue deep packet inspection and network virtualization are both best done at the edge, in hosts, because these are processor intensive tasks—often requiring more processing power and time than network devices have available. Finally, they argue network security should be located on the host, because the host has the fine-grained service information required to perform accurate filtering, etc.

Based on their arguments, the authors propose four rules of thumb. First, tasks that leverage data only available at the edge should run at the edge. Second, tasks that leverage data naturally found in the network should be run in the network. Third, tasks that require large amounts of processing power or memory should be run on the edge. Fourth, tasks that run at very short timescales should be run in the network.

I have, of course, some quibbles with their arguments … For instance, the argument that security should run on the edge, in hosts, assumes a somewhat binary view of security—all filters and security mechanisms should be “one place,” and nowhere else. A security posture that just moves “the firewall” from the edge of the network to the edge of the host, however, is going to (eventually) face the same vulnerabilities and issues, just spread out over a larger attack surface (every host instead of the entry to the network). Security shouldn’t work this way—the network and the host should work together to provide defense in depth.

The rules of thumb, however, seem to be pretty solid starting points for thinking about the problem. An alternate way of phrasing their result is through the principle of subsidiarity—decisions should be made as close as possible to the information required to make them. While this is really a concept that comes out of ethics and organizational management, it succinctly describes a good rule of thumb for network architecture.