Network Field Day 22 - DriveNets

DriveNets gave a great presentation. As stated in previous blog posts, this was my first NFD and DriveNets was the first presentation for the entire 3-days. These guys really set the bar high and lead the way with a lot of great technical content. DriveNets found a way to create a horizontally scalable routing platform by completely disaggregating the software from the hardware. While there are a few common buzzwords in there that are getting a lot of air-time these days, what these guys are doing is very different from other vendors.

If you want to learn more about containers, orchestration, distributed systems and whitebox hardware go watch the DriveNets presentations from Network Field Day 22.

Traditional Routing platforms are appliances or chassis based. You can’t just add more ports to an appliance. You can only grow a chassis to the full-capacity of its line cards.

Scalable Operations

Horizontally scalable means to add nodes (or remove nodes) as you want to increase (or decrease) your scale. This goes hand-in-hand is distributed systems. One of the best ways to build distributed systems is to separate the application from the operating system by way of containers. Containers make applications portable and can then live on any compute resource. Understanding the maintenance and management of containers is important for this model. Each container should contain a single process. For example, you would have a separate container for each protocol you’re running. This is important because if you aren’t running a particular protocol you don’t have to deploy that container. Also, in looking down the road toward upgrades, you typically don’t ‘upgrade’ and container, instead you redeploy the container with the updated application code inside.

Disaggregated Hardware and Software

DriveNets are using standardized whitebox hardware running a flavor of Linux (Ubuntu) in order install Docker and run their containers. If you standardize the hardware, you can streamline the base OS installation and maintenance leaving only an orchestration layer to spin up and distribute the containers onto each nodes as necessary. DriveNets has their own orchestrator called DNOR (DriveNets Orchestrator). This all creates a model that each node can be thought of like Lego block. If you want to add more compute and more ports you add another Lego block. Compared to a typical hierarchical network model of Edge-Aggregate-and-Core this all gets distilled into a single platform.

This architecture really hit close to home because my company and some of my direct work has been engineering horizontally scalable distributed systems for Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO) purposes. I understand engineering efforts behind this design. What DriveNets has accomplished is very cool.

Who's Using It?

Now, most businesses or enterprises don’t need horizontally scalable networking. This seems to be a great fit for service providers and cloud scalers where growth is rapid and seemingly never ending. There are cost savings and operational benefits to doing it this way. Say goodbye to the days of changing out chassis to increase capacity, in this model of building networks modularly like DriveNets, you can add resources as you need in the form of adding nodes. All of the work that DriveNets is doing in software development, ensures this process of scaling up or adding nodes happens seamlessly and that your network can continue to grow.

I really enjoyed their presentation.

If you want to learn more about containers, orchestration, distributed systems and whitebox hardware go watch the DriveNets presentations from Network Field Day 22.

For the full list of presenters, all the videos, links to all the delegates and more check out the NFD22 website: https://techfieldday.com/event/nfd22/

Disclaimer: I was invited to Networking Field Day 22 with GestaltIT covering travel and accommodation. There is no requirement to blog, promote, or produce any content from the event. This post is my opinion and my opinion alone.