Heavy Networking 458: SDN Federation – One Controller To Rule Them All?

Today’s show dives into the notion of SDN federation.
Any organization running a sufficiently-sized infrastructure is going to have a variety of software controllers for automation and orchestration.
You may have one in the data center, one for SD-WAN, one for security, one for wireless, and so on.
How do these software controllers federate? That is, how do they organize and coordinate to act in a unified manner to ensure that operational, policy, and security goals are met?
My guest is Rob Sherwood, an Internet researcher and open source enthusiast. The former CTO of the SDN startup Big Switch, Rob is currently a software engineer at Facebook.
We discuss:

* Whether all these controllers can and should be federated
* The technical and organizational barriers
* How to find a common language for each network silo
* How vendors are approaching the problem
* Whether a master controller can work
* How do we get interoperability? What’s the protocol?
* The role of analytics and visibility

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Show Links:
Rob Sherwood on LinkedIn