PANTHEON.tech had a unique opportunity to participate at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2018. The central topic of the ONS 2018 was data center solutions: ONAP and Kubernetes based systems. Also, several new projects under the wings of Linux Foundation were introduced. For example “Acumos AI“, “Arkaino Edge stack” and DANOS (Disaggregated Network Operating System project) which is the operating system for white-box switches.
PANTHEON.tech has traditionally participated in the OpenDaylight (ODL) as well as the fd.io development and we launched our lighty.io product in the ONS. lighty.io changes conventional OpenDaylight attitude on how to build SDN controller applications, making them smaller, nimble and micro-service ready.
lighty.io caught the attention of the OpenDaylight community members, as well as customers struggling with real-life OpenDaylight deployments. This solution helps to consume and deploy OpenDaylight services faster, with a lower cost of ownership. Faster builds, quick test runs and smaller distribution sizes are the right way to proceed. lighty.io brings also added value into the ONAP eco-system providing runtime for ONAP’s SDN-C. We are continuously updating the community with lighty.io use-case examples and also lighty.io video use-cases
One of the projects, in which we participate in the community, is The Fast Data Project (FD.io). For the FD.io community, we presented Ligato; Honeycomb’s younger brother. It is an ’easy to learn and easy to use’ integration platform. We love to see, that the FD.io community is growing larger, not only in the number of contributors but in the number of projects and use-cases as well.
We were also pleased to accept an invitation to an introduction of a new FD.io project“Dual Modes, Multi-Protocols, Multi-Instances” (DMM), where we discussed use-cases and integration paths from the current networking stack. FD.io community has the potential of further growth, especially as we see the shift of the networking industry from closed-source, hardware-based network functions to an open-source software-based solution.
ONS 2018 was an exciting opportunity for us. It was a forum where we could easily share our knowledge and provide a much-needed innovation. Let’s see how artificial intelligence and machine learning will change the landscape of networking in the upcoming years. See you at the next ONS event!
Thanks to PANTHEON.tech, I had an opportunity to attend PyCon SK conference that took place on March 9 – 11, 2018 in Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies of Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava. Its intent was to promote Python, spread open source technologies and open source ideas. Speakers were professionals from various areas of software development – from documentation writers through big data analysts to coders as such. Thus, the lectures covered a wide area of topics and possibly anyone could have found their cup of tea.
Friday, 9 March
The day started with Alex Ellis’s talk about OpenFaaS (Functions as a Service). He introduced the OpenFaaS project, made an account on how to build one’s own serverless functions in containers using Docker, or Kubernetes, or other orchestrators through the extensible architecture. In the talk, practical demonstrations of the use of serverless functions were made, such as voice-driven getting of information on weather and other stuff, turning black-and-white pictures to colourful in one click, etc.
Later on talks continued with Mikey Ariel, also known as That Docs Lady. She talked about docs and the community. In her talk, she pointed out various types of project documentation – from READMEs, through quickstart tutorials, to error messages. The talk introduced or re-acquainted us with topics such as content strategy, docs-as-code, optimized DevOps for docs, and contribution workflows. One of many witty observation she made was: “Instead of documenting a bunch of bugs, why not to fix them?!”
Saturday, 10 March
For me, personally, Saturday provided few highlights.
Anton Caceres talked about big data analysis, and libraries and tools that Python provides in this area of programming. What he emphasized as core skills of data scientists were ability to read data, to visualize it, to formulate right questions, and to endorse one’s imagination while answering those questions by visual presentation of the data.
Another interesting one was by Michael Kennedy. The topic was “Pythonic code, by example”. He explained the concepts of writing idiomatic code in Python (i.e. Pythonic code) that is most aligned with the language features and ideals. This talk took us on a tour of some of the more important pythonic concepts using many examples of perfectly functional Python code that was non-pythonic with pythonic equivalents. Most of the code examples were written in Python 3.5.
Ryan Kirkbride gave the last talk of the day; or better said a performance. He suggested that while coding is mostly quite a lonely activity in which a coder interacts with the program, there is also a way to make coding an interactive activity shared with a community. He himself provided an example by live coding a program that generated music. The idea of sharing an experience of coding with others underlined the idea behind the conference – collaboration, sharing and community.
Sunday, 11 March
On Sunday, we had a look at end-to-end testing of UI of the application. Vladimir Kopso spoke about writing an end-to-end testing automation Framework and some tips for making the code cleaner. He also spoke about parallel running of multiple test suites in Docker containers and time saving this approach brought to running automation test suites.
Tibor Arpáš presented his ideas on how to make writing code in various IDEs more efficient and how to give the coder valuable information on their code. He suggested that when running a code, valuable information is created about the code itself. He came up with few ideas on how to display this information together with the code at one place.
To sum it up, in three days which were full of Python and open source topics, we learned a lot from the speakers. Some of them were better, some of them a bit boring, but there were few that were highly motivating and engaging. Community was the leitmotif that appeared across almost all of them and was apparent also in the overall atmosphere of openness in the hallways, where you could address speakers and discuss with them.
Big thanks to PANTHEON.tech and to the organizers of PyCon SK 2018 for this amazing experience.
OpenDaylight’s YANG Tools project, forms the bottom-most layer of OpenDaylight as an application platform. It defines and implements interfaces for modeling, storing and transforming data modeled in RFC7950, known as YANG 1.1 — such as a YANG parser and compiler.
What is YANG Tools?
Pantheon engineers started developing yangtools some 5 years ago. It originally supported RFC6020, going through a number of different versions. After releasing yangtools-1.0.0, we introduced semantic versioning as an API contract. Since then, we have retrofitted original RFC6020 meta-model to support RFC7950. We also implemented the corresponding parser bits, which were finalized in yangtools-1.2.0 and shipped with the Nitrogen Simultaneous Release.
This release entered its development phase on August 14th 2017. yangtools-2.0.0 was released on November 27th 2017, which is when the search of an integration window started. Even though we had the most critical downstream integration patches prepared, most of down-streams did not have their patches even started. Integration work and coordination was quickly escalated to the TSC. The integration finally kicked off on January 11, 2018.
Integration was mostly complicated by the fact that odlparent-3.0.x was riding with us, along with the usual Karaf/Jetty/Jersey/Jackson integration mess. It is now sorted out, with yangtools-2.0.1 being the release to be shipped in the Oxygen simultaneous Release.
What is new in yangtools-2.0.1?
309 commits
2009 files changed
54126 insertions(+)
45014 deletions(-)
The most user-visible change is that in-memory data tree now enforces mandatory leaf node presence for operational store by default. This can be tweaked via the DataTreeConfiguration interface on a per-instance basis, if need be, but we recommend against switching it off.
For downstream users using karaf packaging, we have split our features into stable and experimental ones. Stable features are available from features-yangtools and contain the usual set of functionality, which will only expand in its capabilities. Experimental features are available from features-yangtools-experimental and carry functionality which is not stabilized yet and may get removed — this currently includes ObjectCache, which is slated for removal, as Guava’s Interners are better suited for the job.
Users of yang-maven-plugin will find that YANG files packaged in jars now have their names normalized to RFC7950 guidelines. This includes using the actual module or submodule name as well as capturing the revision in the filename.
API Changes
From API change perspective, there are two changes which stand out. We have pruned all deprecated methods and all YANG 1.1 API hacks marked with ‘FIXME: 2.0.0’ have been cleared up. This results in better ergonomics for both API users and implementors.
yang-model-api has seen some incompatible changes, ranging from renaming of AugmentationNode, TypedSchemaNode and ChoiceCaseNode to some targetted use of Optional instead of nullable returns. Most significant change here is the introduction of EffectiveStatement specializations — I will cover these in detail in a follow-up post, but these have enabled us to do the next significant item.
YANG parser has been refactored into multiple components. Its internal structure changed, in order to hide most of the implementation classes and methods. It is now split into:
yang-parser-impl (being the default-configured parser instance)
and a slew of parser extensions (RFC6536, RFC7952, RFC8040)
There is an yang-parser-spi artifact, too, which hosts common namespaces and utility classes, but its layout is far from stabilized. Overall the parser has become a lot more efficient, better at detecting and reporting model issues. Implementing new semantic extensions has become really a breeze.
YANG Codecs
YANG codecs have seen a major shift, with the old XML parser in yang-data-impl removed in favor of yang-data-codec-xml. yang-data-codec-gson gains the ability to parse and emit RFC7951 documents. This allows RFC8040 NETCONF module to come closer to full compliance. Since the SchemaContext is much more usable now, with Modules being indexed by their NameModule, the codec operations have become significantly faster.
Overall, we are in a much better and cleaner shape. We are currently not looking at a 3.0.0 release anytime soon and can actually deliver incremental improvements to YANG Tools in a much more rapid cadence than previously possible with the entire OpenDaylight simultaneous release cycle being in the way.
We already have another round of changes ready for yangtools-2.0.2 and are looking forward to publishing them.
At the end of November 2017, a very special talk took place at Banská Bystrica’s Matej Bel University. Within the broader “Extrapolations and the Scientific Colloquium” program, a lecture featuring the legend of Czechoslovak computing and father of the PMD-85, Roman Kišš, took place. Why is he a legend and why was it a must for me to see him talk, even though I only received the invitation for the event three hours before its launch?
Roman Kišš is the inventor of the most successful Czechoslovak computer of the 1980s, the PMD-85. He has also developed its Didaktik Alfa clone. In case you attended an elementary or secondary school, or the youth Pioneer organization in 1980s communist Czechoslovakia, you definitely must have had a close encounter with a PMD.
An 8-bit computer, built by Tesla Piešťany using the MHB 8080A processor, it was a clone of the Intel 8080. With 48KB RAM and 4KB ROM, it was considered ahead of its time. In spite of consisting of low-quality components, its performance was unmatched.
My first ever experience with a computer in the 1980s, was with a PMD. Roman Kišš’s work, from a technological point of view, was on par with what Jobs and Wozniak had done in the US.
When I had the chance to go see Mr. Kišš’s lecture, I could not have refused. Nostalgia, curiosity, and the almost mystical aura encompasses his personality.
The lecture was divided into two segments:
PMD-85 and how it came to life
Microsoft Azure
I was mainly curious about the PMD-85-focused segment.
During the first segment, Roman Kišš discussed how things worked in communist Czechoslovakia (or, how nothing worked). Stores had no supplies, nothing was in stock and anything you were able to lay your hands on was either rubbish, or stolen from somewhere.
There was a popular saying that if you stand out of the crowd, your head will be chopped off. Or, as a late 80s punk song recommended, everyone shall write with a blue pen. Look the same, behave the same, and do not deviate from the crowd. Unfortunately, many of these habits still persist, especially one that has become a part of our folklore: do only what we are told to. This is also called the “zero fails given approach.”
Mr. Kišš talked a lot, but, unfortunately, not enough about technicalities regarding the PMD. He discussed organizing his work, research and people, which was of great value to me. He talked for over an hour and even though he swamped us with information, it was not even a tenth of what he’d want to say.
For me, the main takeaways were three messages that I’ve been thinking about for weeks to come.
01: You need to leave. You’ve outgrown us.
When Roman Kišš reached the stage that everybody in Czechoslovakia wanted a PMD, his head of team at Tesla Piešťany had a chat with him.
“Roman, we’ll need you to leave. You’ve outgrown us.”
To this, Roman‘s reply was brief,
“It’s your fault that you haven’t moved an inch!”
I could immediately imagine a young enthusiast, not really fitting the “zero fails given” environment. The main problem was, that they could not afford to employ him, unless he was supposed to be a department of his own. Without them as his colleagues. Of course, you would not want to employ a colleague who turned everyone into his enemies by achieving something within several months, that others had been struggling with for years without any results.
With the money Mr. Kišš had earned for patents and sales of older PMI 80 computers, he was able to put together enough of his own resources, to fund a team of enthusiasts who had helped him with prototyping. What were his objectives? Motivating people with potential and willing to work.
He built an exclusive club of co-workers, which a number of people wanted to join. He paid for team buildings in exclusive restaurants, keeping open tabs. Even though, looking back, it might look like PMD-85 was an achievement of an individual, it was, in fact, the achievement of a team. The PMD-85 computer was a proof of concept which needed transforming into a product. Kišš knew this and he did everything that could have been done.
He managed to build a team which was much better and stronger than the communist economic model, based on five-year plans, could imagine, even in its representatives’ wildest dreams full of shots fired at Saint Petersburg’s Winter Palace. He’d done everything he could so that the team could continue growing. Taking trainings and improving their education. He had a clear target and kept focused at achieving it. A good team leader keeps his target in the cross-hairs.
02: You can’t be both a good father and a great professional
This sentence came together with an explanation: you can’t be perfect doing both at the same time. You can’t be completely devoted to both your work and your family. One of them will always be sidelined. Mr. Kišš admitted that he didn’t spend enough time with his family as he spent almost all of it at work. This made me think – what has changed compared to the 1980s?
Team work is one of the most important soft skills, yet you come out of school without ever having heard of it. We have better access to better information. We have the tools and procedures how to learn better and faster. We’ve got everything we need, but is that enough? Most probably not.
Having the means but lacking motivation is worse, than not having the means at all. We primarily need motivation to work hard – this was true then as it is now. However, everything is a matter of scale: do I work hard because I want to improve myself and advance the team, or do I work hard because I always want to be the best?
In the first case, you are cooperation-oriented, leaving enough room for both being a good father and a great professional. However, the second case is strongly competitive and leaves room for nothing else; the drive to be the best always needs someone to compete with.
And now for the philosophical question: is it better to be a strong member of a strong team which would also be able to thrive without a specific individual, or be the dominant member having a fully dependent team, which, if losing the dominant member, ceases to exist? I’d go for being a strong member of a strong team.
What about you, dear reader?
03: Money should never be your goal, only the means for reaching one
As I already mentioned, Roman Kišš spent a lot of his own resources on materializing his ideas. He spent it on people, literature, electronic components, and whatever he currently needed. Making money has never been his goal. As he mentioned, he received only 4 Kčs per each o125 000 pieces sold of the PMDs-85.
He also earned a little designing the Didaktik Alfa computer for Didaktik Skalica. He’s invested all the funds into moving his projects forward; and to live off during his emigration period in Canada. This was after he had realized, there is no room for hos further growth in Czechoslovakia. Also, no one wanted to employ him any more, but that’s a different story.
After relocating to Canada, he had to start from scratch. He’d been doing a semi-legal PhD. This means, he had done everything other PhD students were doing at the university, but without receiving a salary. What was his reward? The professor who led his research arranged that Kišš could attend all the lectures and take all the exams. Almost a normal university study – without receiving a diploma at the end.
His motivation was purely about acquiring knowledge. However, he did not hesitate and accepted: after you’ve reached certain skills, no one is interested in what you’ve studied, only in what you know. Your knowledge is the only thing you truly own. Roman Kišš’s knowledge and skills have helped him reach much more net worth than those 500 000 Czechoslovak crowns he spent for his diploma-less studies.
Here I have to ask myself: what’s the sum of all my knowledge when Google has an outage? It may be an over-used phrase, yet I truly believe that this gentleman is a living example that everyone should do what they consider meaningful, not what makes them a fortune. Do your best and money will come.
…and back to PMD-85
The PMD-85 computer is a piece of technology holding a very special place in my life. It’s primarily a personal nostalgia, as it was the first computer I got as a third grader. My father built it from components that he honorably stole, which was the standard way of acquiring most possessions in a socialist economy.
I started learning BASIC first, later switching to Pascal at Banská Bystrica Pioneer organization, which was, by the way, located in the same building where PANTHEON.tech has its Banská Bystrica office now. Later on, a second piece was added to my private collection.
I took them both to Roman Kišš’s lecture to meet their creator. I got them both signed. And I thanked him for PMD-85 being responsible for my career, for doing stuff that I truly like, for living.
Mr. Kišš seemed to be happy, and so am I. Thanks to Mr. Kišš, PMD-85 and my father.
At the beginning of December 2017, we attended the KubeCon & CloudNativeCon 2017 conference in Austin, Texas. The conference, organized by the Linux Foundation, brought together leading contributors in cloud native applications and computing, containers, micro-services, central orchestration processing and related projects.
More than four thousand developers, together with other people interested in cloud-native technologies, visited the event in Austin. The growing number of attendees is a testimony to the rising importance of Kubernetes and containerized applications for companies of all sizes.
The schedule was full of talks about various CNCF technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Docker, Envoy, CNI and many others. “Kubernetes is the new Linux,” pointed out Google’s Kelsey Hightower in his keynote, predicting bright future for these technologies.
In addition to talks, the sponsors at KubeCon showcased their projects in a huge exhibition hall. The FD.io booth presented a project our friends from Cisco contributed to – VPP centric network plugin for Kubernetes which aims to provide the fastest connectivity for containers by bypassing the kernel network stack. During the presentation of the project, we were involved in many conversations with attendees from various companies, which proves their interest in the solution.
The IETF 100 Hackathon wrapped up several weeks ago in steamy Singapore. Over two hundred participants spent the weekend on November 11th – 12th discussing, collaborating and developing sample code, solutions and ideas that show practical implementations of IETF standards. The theme was IPv4-IPv6 Transition Technology Interop. We, at PANTHEON.tech, had to be part of it.
It goes on between two characters, one of whom is an IPv6 proponent while the other one really admires NATs: and that was our team. We wanted to test, if the “new” Internet would run on IPv6 plus NAT64, or whether we can keep the “old” Internet working forever through the IPv4 address sharing mechanisms.
The room started to fill quickly after the doors opened. We displayed a poster that introduced the project and after a brief kick-off presentation got to work. Our table, full of power outlets, switches, gateways, routers and patch cables, attracted the most interest among the hackathon participants.
Transition technology interop.
Testing and findings
The hackathon was the first opportunity for interop testing of VPP DS-Lite AFTR as well as NAT64 and LW46. We also spent the weekend implementing the VPP DHCPv6 PD client, Stun library DNS64 NAT64 discovery / IPv4 literal synthesizer. We also tried testing applications behind DS-Lite, 464 XLAT and NAT64.
We’ve made a few interesting findings. On the iPhone, the ecosystem which is forcing IPv6-only support, almost everything works. On the laptop, most stuff works. We learned that building these networks is very hard! I mean, we thought IPv6 should just be plug and play. These IPv6 addresses are long to type and synthesizing IPv6 address from NAT64 prefixes was a poor idea, but at least we fixed a buffer overflow bug. Media still works point-to-point, even behind multiple NATs.
Views from Singapore windows.
Results & future of IPv6
We think the future should really be IPv6 plus NAT64, but this puts new requirements on IPv6 hosts. They need to be able to do NAT64 prefix discovery, synthesize IPv6 address from IPv4 literal and have to support local DNS64.
Our work continued on Sunday until 2pm when we stop doing whatever we were doing and the sharing of results begins. Presentation, no longer than 3 minutes, recapping results, lessons learned and recommendations. The video from presentations and awards is available on YouTube.
At the end of October 2017, I had a chance to visit one of the world’s largest cities – beautiful Moscow, capital of Russia, where the BIS 2017 event took place. BIS – Building Infrastructure Systems – focused on data centers, networks and technologies connected to these topics.
The venue of choice was the Asimut Hotel. It was a fully smoking-free zone, with lots of photos on the walls picturing healthy ways of life.
Organization
BIS 2017 was a very well organized and the timing precise. Everything was on time and easy to find. It was attended by nearly 1000 delegates. Among them were many representatives of businesses and government bodies, highly skilled technical specialists and CxOs managing large companies.
Since the very beginning, I literally had no time to sit down for a while. Such was the number of visitors to our booth. Most of them showed great interest in our company’s scope of work, the level of expertise we provide, projects we participated at. Not only that – there were hundreds of other questions they wanted to ask.
Presentation day
At 11:20 of the event day, we had a presentation slot allocated for PANTHEON.tech. People were showing great interest in SDN, NFV and IoT technologies. I have had 15 minutes to discuss the latest trends in SDN and NFV and to introduce our company to the audience.
Unfortunately, there was almost no time left for the Q&A part, so I invited everyone to our booth. And people came right after the presentation! Until the very end of the day, people kept coming and asking questions, references and contacts. That was truly amazing!
Networking
I have spoken to people from the Government of Moscow, from financial bodies, telecom and development companies. There were several representatives from largest Russian system integration companies, who were interested in cooperation.
At the same time, it was inspiring to listen to their practical “field” experience and their understanding of the market. The overall impression I had is, that the SDN/NFV technologies are recently being actively researched and tested in Russia. However, significant ROI is still a rare case here. We need more work and time until that point is reached.
My final impression was, that we came to show PANTHEON.tech to Russia just in the right time. There are many interesting projects out there, where our long-term expertise in the field of networking software development may prove useful.
PANTHEON.tech was part of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) 2017 in New York. The conference were held from October 17th, until the 18th.
ONUG Highlights & Insights
ONUG belongs to the group of conferences rather smaller in size, but surely not in importance. This year it took place in New York. The Big Apple is a truly interesting place and so was the conference. This event was a combination of trade show and a panel discussion.
Pantheon Technologies did not actively participate in the trade show part this time, as our focus was more on potential business hunting.
ONUG is a 2-day event fully packed with big names on stage, as part of panel discussions, and a good selection of vendors, community leaders, service and solution providers.
The conference includes keynotes from IT business enterprise leaders as they address their open software-defined cloud-based infrastructure journeys, updates from the Working Group Initiative members, hands-on tutorials and interactive labs, real world use cases, proof of concept demonstrations and a vendor technology showcase.
The goal of all ONUG events and initiatives is to bring together the full IT community, allow IT business leaders to:
learn from peers
make informed open infrastructure deployment decisions
open up a dialogue between the vendor and user communities, in order to collectively drive open infrastructure
We are looking forward to ONUG 2018
For Pantheon Technologies, this was a good opportunity to understand current networking needs of service providers, enterprises and vendors. This helps us to improve promoting Pantheon even better in the field of our expertise, in customized software development. ONUG clearly showed, that service providers are heading more and more towards SD-WAN solutions.
We have discussed our expertise in SDN and NFV with almost all of the ONUG participants. We have also found several potential partners to explore this exciting business with. Software Defined Networking is not only a buzzword anymore, it’s been well established and the market is very competitive, especially in the US territory.
That is why we at Pantheon Technologies needs to be on top of it.
This year, our colleagues from PANTHEON.tech visited quite a couple of tech events around the globe. Among them, the SDN NFV World Congress, taking place in Hague, was one we definitely couldn’t have missed.
As one of the largest conferences focused at network transformation, it attracted more than 1700 visitors from companies all over the world. And it weren’t only large companies, many of whom are among our long-term clients; a fairly large number of start-ups joined in order to present their solutions.
Intent-based Networking: Still not in sight
It’s thrilling to follow the gradual transformation of proprietary solutions into those based on open-source. The reason is simple: at Pantheon Technologies, we contribute into several open-source projects, as we firmly believe that it’s the only way to ensure interoperability and standardization of individual building blocks of SDN and NFV solutions.
Software-defined networking is still under development. Until the present, most use-cases have only been dealing with automation. The bottom line is that it’s still a HDN – human-defined network. It’s still people who express the desired state of the network, it’s not done by a software.
Therefore, after solving the issues with automation and interoperability of the building blocks, a new adventure from the intent-based networking world might await. The current SDN solutions offered by the market, will only provide the infrastructure to be used to fulfill the network users’ intentions.
During the week which we spent at the conference, we’ve had plenty of interesting discussions, both sales-oriented and technical. Now, we’re very much looking forward to further meetings and discussions.
Looking for customers and partners in new markets is an essential part of a diversification strategy. New markets bring new opportunities, new insights, needs and challenges. Hence, at the beginning of this October. With my colleagues Denis and Robert, we traveled to Singapore in search of all of the above-mentioned.
We’ve anticipated finding it all at the huge TechXLR8 event, sponsored by PANTHEON.tech, which comprised of smaller happenings: 5G Asia, IoT World Asia, NV & SDN, the AI Summit and Project Kairos Asia. Being the Silver Sponsor at such a vast event was a brand new experience for us.
We’ve spent two days discussing SDN and networking, introducing Pantheon Technologies and our products to the representatives of Asian market. We also had an opportunity to take part in a panel discussion on NFV MANO interoperability and how it fits into the open source world along with related standardization being done by ETSI.
This discussion, more than anything else, showed our presence to other attendees. So, we talked, smiled and explained. People were interested in Visibility Package which we have demonstrated. They asked a lot about the company and our contribution to OpenDaylight, as well as other open source projects we are part of, or have experience with.
SDN, OpenDaylight and the others
Pantheon Technologies was not the only company promoting OpenDaylight-related solutions. Official OpenDaylight members were present, as well as other companies and groups offering their ODL based solutions. We have received several offers for cooperation from several company representatives advertising their ODL and SDN-related skills. This clearly indicates the importance of the OpenDaylight project.
IoT is the word
Despite TechXLR8 being crowded with companies presenting different IoT solutions and despite having our booth placed at NFV/SDN area, we have received a great number of IoT-related questions. We talked about IotDM as of oneM2m compliant data broker for ODL. For some people, oneM2M was just another buzzword. They were frequently asking about specific use cases related to the IoT field. Our question, “what do you need?” still hangs there waiting to be answered. Asia seems to be searching for its answer on what IoT stands for. There are open opportunities for us to help finding an answer for this question.
Man in the middle
Along all the companies presenting their products, skills or ecosystems, there was one special group of people present. They usually introduced themselves as “the company that represents telco in Asia.” Who were these people?
Asian markets are quite different from what we have experienced so far – in a way how companies search for partners and how partnerships are being built. There are many companies acting as matchmakers. It seems that a significant number of telco companies don’t actively search for partners, but rely on matchmakers. Matchmakers actively seek solutions or vendors, who might match their telco customers. What do matchmakers have to say about their customer’s expectations?
All of them had pretty much the same answer. We need to approach companies with our solutions and make them think it is what they need. As if only thing market is looking for was advantage over competitors. Whatever solution will make that happen.
Even that we can’t honestly say there is a market driving vision missing, it for sure feels that way. Presence of buzzwords without focus on specific case indicates that Asian telco and IT market has evolved differently as markets we use to operate.
Hic abundant leones
The best way to describe our first encounter with the Asian market is mapping terra incognita, the unknown land, a place where lions are. We’ve made the first step towards the unknown and have found some potential partners on the way. Now we have to figure out how to turn the first contact into a working partnership and collaboration.
We need to find a set of use cases, to show to potential customers in Asia, but we aren’t quite sure what to show and whom to show it. Finding that out is our next goal. Find use case to make a showcase of and find audience for it. For that, we need to flood the matchmakers we already know and also keep looking for new ones.
Lesson learned
Are our solutions tailored to fulfill specific needs? Indeed they are. Do our solutions bring variety and scalability? Definitely. Can we deliver? Yes we can. Next time, we have to show that more explicitly. We need to prepare showcases that would amaze people.
We need to find equilibrium between our skill and the market’s desire for buzzwords. It does not need to be product quality, does not even need to be a product by itself. It just needs to show – hey, we are the right ones.
Our journey to Singapore was a success. The journey to Asian markets has just begun. It is our job to make the most out of it.
In this short article, I would like to share our experience in the field of integrating VPP and Honeycomb, and about the extension of VPP services. Among our colleagues are many developers who contribute to both projects, as well as people who work on integrating these two projects. These developers also work on integrating them with the rest of the networking world.
Let’s define the basic terms.
What is VPP?
According to its wiki page, it is “an extensible framework that provides out-of-the-box production quality switch/router functionality”. There is definitely more to say about VPP, but what’s most important is that it:
provides switch and router functionality
is in production quality level
is platform independent
“Platform independent” means, that it is up to your decision where you will run it (virtualized environment, bare-metal or others). VPP is a piece of software, which is by default spread in the form of packages. Final VPP packages are available from the official documentation page. Let’s say we decide to use stable VPP in version 17.04 on a stable Ubuntu version 16.04. You can download all available packages from the corresponding Nexus site. If there is no such platform available at Nexus, you can still download VPP and build it on the platform, which you need.
VPP will process packets, which flow in your network similarly to a physical router, but with one big advantage: you do not need to buy a router. You can use whatever physical device you have and just install the VPP modules.
What is Honeycomb?
It is a specific VPP interface. Honeycomb provides NETCONF and RESTCONF interface on northbound and stores required configuration (in form of XML or JSON) in local data store. There is also the hc2vpp project, which calls the corresponding VPP API as reaction to a new configuration stored in data store.
In VPP, there is a special CLI that is used to communicate with VPP. It is in text form (similarly as in OS). To make it easier to use VPP, we also have Honeycomb. It provides an interface, which is somewhere between a GUI and a CLI. You can also request VPP state or statistics of via XML, and you will get the response in an XML form. Honeycomb can be installed in the same way as VPP, through packages, which can be accessed from the Nexus site.
Where can the combination of VPP and Honeycomb be used?
We’ve already showcased several use cases on our PANTHEON.tech YouTube channel:
Another alternative is to use the two as vCPE (Virtual Customer Premises Equipment) as specified in this draft. One of projects which wants to implement it is ONAP. VPP used as vCPE-endpoint for the internet connection from a provider. According to this use case, vCPE should provide several services. In standalone VPP, such services aren’t supported, but they still can be added to a machine where VPP is running. For demonstration, we have chosen DHCP and DNS.
DHCP
In this case, we have two VMs. VM0 simulates the client side (DHCP client) which wants IP address to be assigned to interface enp0s9. VM1 contains VPP and a DHCP server. The DHCP request is broadcasted via enp0s9 at VM0 to VPP1 via port 192.168.40.2. VPP1 is set as proxy DHCP server and DHCP request message is forwarded to 192.168.60.2, where the DHCP server will response with a DHCP offer. Finally, after all DHCP configuration steps are done, interface enp0s9 at VM0 is configured with IP address 192.168.40.10.
DNS
In this case, we also have two VMs. VM0 simulates the client side (DNS client) which needs to resolve domain name to IP address. This request is routed via local port to VPP1, where it is routed to DNS server in VM1. If this resolution is required for the first time, then the request will be sent to the external DNS server. Otherwise, local DNS server will serve this request.
As a company with highly skilled people and experience in networking and ODL, PANTHEON.tech provides solutions to any problem or requirement our clients bring up. In this case, we are going to illustrate what we can do on showcasing the workflow of a project.
Identifying a need
The first step was to identify a need; one of the main issues of working with data-store is that we lose data when the Controller goes down.
Proposing a solution
Once we’ve identified the need, we start looking for possible solutions, analyzing each one’s pros and cons, looking for the best answer available. In this case, the best available solution was to replace the in-memory ODL datastore with a persistent database: the Apache Cassandra Data Store.
What is Cassandra?
If you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance, the Apache Cassandra database is the right choice for you. It is the perfect platform for mission-critical data thanks to linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on cloud infrastructure or commodity hardware.
Cassandra is able of replicating across multiple datacenters and it’s best in the class. With her, your users are provided with lower latency – and you with peace of mind, if you realize how simple surviving a regional outage is.
Defining the solution requirements
We need to define the requirements for the proposed solution: what will it do, and how, requirements from the user. For this project, we’ve decided that the user would need to register the service at a specific prefix, pointing at a specific path on a shard which the user is interested in storing.
The service will be listening to any changes under this and whenever the information is updated, it will take care of transforming the information into the JSON format, and store it in Cassandra.
Implementing the solution & testing
We’ve defined the requirements and have selected the solution. We’ve identified the steps required/wanted to achieve the results expected. Based upon them, we’ve created the tasks required and have implemented them. Finally, we shall test the result. We can see some of the anticipated results in the table below.
Rate: Writes per second rate.
Duration: Request duration in milliseconds.
Count: A number of changes applied to simulated
* Benchmark, Karaf and Cassandra were running under same Virtual Machine, with 8G RAM and 4 Processors dedicated
Use-cases
We’ve identified one use case for this project – which is to have a persistent data-store. But the list of possible benefits does not end there.
Given the case that we were storing the OpenFlow statistics, we could benefit from having that information using Spark for applying Real-time data analytics & visualization on it. This would allow us to react and improve our network by, for example, banning or redirecting heavy traffic. Once we have the information, everything we need is to pick up the fruit.
In mid-October, the SDN NFV World Congress will dominate Europe’s IT landscape. Taking place in Netherlands’ Hague, the event is Europe’s largest dedicated forum addressing the growing markets of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
Naturally, this is the type of event we at Pantheon Technologies gravitate towards sponsoring. We’re officially one of the partners of this event. There were already a couple of interesting names on board (Open Networking Foundation, Intel, Telefonica, BT, Konia, Orange…) so how could we be the one to miss out?
If you’d like to hear about technologies such as OpenDaylight, FD.io, OPNFV and many more – and learn about the magic we can work with them, we’ll be looking forward to talking to you live! Also, if you just want to know us, or only have a chat, feel free to drop by!
We’ve already started establishing a tradition of Pantheon Technologies partnering with the best tech events around the globe. To keep up with it, we’ll be sponsoring the Network Virtualization & SDN Asia conference, which will be taking place this fall in Singapore as a part of TechXLR8 Asia.
On board with partners such as Juniper Networks, Fujitsu and VMware, we’ll be joining as a silver sponsor.
What does this mean in practice? Our colleagues will be able to showcase the PANTHEON.tech skills and know-how both as speakers and in the exhibition area.
As we were recently proven at TechXLR8 London, our portfolio is quite unique. The topics revolving around ODL, SysRepo, FD.io, Honeycomb and Vector Packet Processing have struck the cord. Not only that we’ve met lots of interesting people from telco, SDN and content delivery companies, but our business card supply wasn’t able to cover the demand!
Is there anything specific you’d like to hear us talk about?
On a regular basis, OpenDaylight (ODL) developers meet in order to discuss their ideas as well as plans for upcoming releases. PANTHEON.tech’s Robert Varga and Vratko Polak have joined this year’s gathering. Vratko’s account of the event follows.
Brief introduction to ODL
OpenDaylight is an open source project aimed at supporting Software Defined Networking, mainly through a Java application (also called ODL). It’s capable of communicating with network elements via various protocols (southbound) while accepting requests from humans and other programs (northbound), again, via various protocols (although RESCONF is currently the main one).
OpenDaylight as a project is hosted by the Linux Foundation (LF), but has its own governance. ODL itself consists of (sub)projects, each has its own Git repository, committers and Project Lead. The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) allows creation of new projects, archival of old projects, and provides guidance for inter-project matters. Most projects focus on providing code for the Java application, so most of their code is in Java, together with Maven definitions used to build artifacts. Those projects depend on each other, ODLParent is the most “upstream” of such projects. Leaf projects are those which do not have other ODL Java project depending on them, not counting Integration/Distribution, which is a project aggregating all artifacts of a particular release into a file archive containing ODL installation.
Integration/Test then runs system tests (CSIT stands for Continuous System Integration Testing) against this archive. Both building and testing is done in Jenkins, Releng/Builder is the project responsible for configuring those Jenkis jobs (and other minutae of infrastructure). In between releases, ODL projects build Snapshot artifacts that are stored in a Nexus server, so artifact version does not define a unique code, and there are possible race conditions when one job uploads new artifacts while other job downloads them.
To avoid these downsides, Releng/Autorelease is a project which downloads all the code, bumps it to a non-snapshot version, builds that, and uploads to a staging repository, thus creating a release candidate. Integration/ and Releng/ projects are examples of Support projects.
Release name & forum
ODL releases are named after periodic table elements. This Forum has taken place just after the Carbon release, and its goal was to bring developers together in order to speed up discussion and planning of the Nitrogen release. One of the few things every project has to agree with, is the choice of the Java container. From Beryllium up to Carbon, the container of choice was Karaf, versions from the 3.0.x series. Karaf is a Java container based on OSGi. The main concept in Karaf is a Feature, which can contain OSGi bundles, config files and other Karaf features. ODL seems to be using Karaf features in a slightly different way from what Karaf developers have intended, therefore the Carbon initiative to upgrade to Karaf 4 has failed. Previous ODL releases tended to come in roughly 8-month cycles. But ODL is now part of larger ecosystem of networking-focused projects, so TSC decided to change to a 6-month cycle. And to fit into a correct slot, Nitrogen is scheduled to be released only 4 months after Carbon, with upgrading to Karaf 4 as its main goal.
The Developer Design Forum (DDF) for Nitrogen has taken place in Hotel Marriott, Santa Clara, California. The official program was two days long, opening on May 31 and concluding on June 1, 2017. DDF gatherings usually consist of scheduled “conference” sessions, accompanied by parallel “unconference” sessions, created on the spot. Compared to previous DDFs, there were less participants than usual (roughly 50 compared to 150 in the past), leading to only one meeting room being used for conferences and leaving the other available for unconferences.
A list of sessions that I attended follows, together with short descriptions. Please note that the descriptions (and session names) are very loose paraphrases of what was actually discussed, based rather on my personal impressions than the official program.
Karaf 4 planning conference session
After reiterating facts about Nitrogen being a “short” release focused on Karaf 4 transition, a rough timeline was presented. It was stressed that active participation of all projects is required. Projects too slow to respond will be dropped from the release mercilessly.
Not many technical details were discussed at this point, aside from notifying projects that there will be a time period where usual build and test jobs will not be running (at least not for every project) as incompatible changes will require time for rebuilds, to be performed in order throughout the project dependency graph.
Emergency leaf project removal plan
Around half of current projects are in dormant state, not being developed anymore, usually with only one person performing critical maintenance in their spare time. It is expected that multiple projects in this state will be unable to perform their Karaf 4 migration duties in time. Therefore, many Carbon projects are not going to make it into Nitrogen official release. Yet, there is a backup plan in place, at least for leaf projects: they could release their artifacts in a standalone release.
That means, their artifacts will not be built within the usual Autorelease job. Releng/Builder can create a job template for that kind of release, so that project won’t need much work to perform such release. Integration/Test would need more changes to allow CSIT for such projects, but we do not envision many projects asking for that.
ODLParentstandalone release
It is a long-standing plan to “decentralize” the ODL release process, so that it depends less on Releng/Autorelease forcing everyone to release at the same time. ODLParent will be the first project to do separate releases (and still end up in Integration/Distribution builds). This needs a new job template, basically the same one as for the removed leafs. Version bumping in downstream will be somewhat painful at first, but the Autorelease project already has all the scripts and rights needed, and an automated job can be created later.
Karaf 4 specific changes
In Carbon it was discovered that two main ways to install features (the featuresBoot configuration line and feature:install runtime command) use different code paths in Karaf 4, and therefore supporting both of them might not be possible. If Linux Foundation pays a Karaf developer, it might become possible, but we cannot count on that within the Nitrogen cycle. The first Karaf 4 ready ODLParent release will drop support for Karaf 3, Integration/Distribution will stop building Karaf 3 distribution, and all CSIT testing will be switched to Karaf 4. That means we do not need to support a transition period of both versions being built and tested at the same time. If we decide to only support feature:install, changes to Releng/Builder scripts (for CSIT) will be needed.
Releng/Builder needed changes
This was a technical session, hashing out details of how items from the two previous sessions will be implemented. Few general enhancements were also discussed briefly, however, with no plans of implementing them in the Nitrogen cycle.
Jira instead of Bugzilla
There is a long-standing plan of migrating from Bugzilla to Jira. We’ve discussed several technical reasons why we really need that, as well as a few risks involved. The general consensus is that we want Jira, but it takes some work and we need a person to take the responsibility and make it happen. Not likely within Nitrogen.
ODLParent planning
Technical explanation of what went wrong with Karaf 4 in Carbon. We have a general plan to finally fix that, consisting of 4 approaches we intend to try. Explicit steps of how ODLParent standalone releases and Karaf 4 support will be done, with milestones and deadlines for ODLParent, Java projects, Integration/Distribution and Integration/Test. There will be at least one period where the usual Jenkins jobs will not work, perhaps more if multiple ODLParent releases are needed. Karaf 3 support will be propped as soon as possible, so that projects are motivated to help their upstream with migration.
Integration/Test planning
Few ideas were mentioned, but they were postponed in general, as Karaf 4 migration will consume most of the time. The old plan of migrating ODL installation logic from Releng/Builder bash scripts to Robot Framework suites is still good, but demanding. General Robot code maintenance will remain a slow gradual process. Having a small set of reliable “sanity” tests is still desired. We have a stub already running; all we need is to add more suites which are stable and quick enough. Test result availability and comprehensibility is still a major issue. The current plan is to export the test results to a database, and have a dashboard to render results in a user-friendly way. We have new interns to work on both steps.
MD-SAL usage
A highly technical session where our colleague from Pantheon Technologies, Robert Varga, was talking about the ways MD-SAL (Model Driven Service Abstraction Layer) can be interacted with. Each has its pros and cons. Single listener subscribed to a set of subtrees seems to be the approach avoiding the most of pitfalls, but the cluster implementation is not ready yet.
Infrastructure and CSIT, retrospective and improvements
The changes to Integration/Test and Releng/Builder done in Carbon. Current gaps and how we plan to bridge them, rehashing some ideas from the unconference earlier.
Upgrade-ability conference session
initially, we will be satisfied with reliable offline upgrades. We know that there are significant API changes between releases, and MD-SAL lacks a service which would tell the user that ODL has finished booting up. ODL has a built-in persistence, but some of it is cleared on startup and, perhaps, also corrupted on shutdown. Nevertheless, companies that create ODL-based solutions usually have a way to transfer data from earlier to later version of ODL, so it should be possible to create a basic mechanism in ODL itself. The Daexim project provides a basic set of tools, but it is not equipped to handle data structure changes caused by API changes in each project. The ODL core can help by sticking to the current schema.
Service recovery mechanisms
As the ‘uninstall’ feature does not really work correctly in ODL, current recovery options are limited to restarting the Java Virtual Machine. However, some services present in ODL support a softer restart on demand. A simple model was presented to abstract services and some actions on them, which would allow a client application to query service state and cause a restart without knowing details of a particular service implementation.
Unit testing async code
One of the criteria for ODL code quality is test coverage. Instead of testing each class as a unit, a higher-level “component” tests are the more common option. They still rely upon JUnit executed during a Maven build, but they test a construct consisting of several classes wired together. This is quite positive, as a “real” unit test would frequently have more complicated assertions, and it would still not be clear whether a composite would behave correctly (while such unit tests would take significantly longer to develop). During Carbon development, a significant progress has been achieved in the wiring part of component tests, yet there still is one area that needs improvement: most of ODL code is asynchronous, which means the component consists of several Java threads running concurrently.
One issue is that JUnit requires the assertion to be executed in the main thread to take effect. Another issue is that many asynchronous components lack visible intermediate state changes, which the main thread could check. Most current tests just use sleep for a fixed time before launching the final assert. However, everybody knows, that a test which relies on sleep is a bad test. The ideal solution would be for each class within a component to support dependency injection of asynchronous building blocks, such as executors and listeners. That way the component test can inject specialized building blocks with all hooks the test needs. Failing that, the cheapest solution is to use Awaitility, which, basically, spins an assert (not changing the state) until it passes, or a predefined time runs out. That is better that sleep in that it can pass more quickly.
Closing remarks
The closing session mostly consisted of discussing, why we were joined by way less attendees than is usual. What can be done? One possibility is to merge the Developer Design Forum with some other LF event, however, people argued that this would take away focus from ODL planning. Another option is to ask member organizations to provide the venue, so that a smaller event like this could be hosted without hotel-high venue cost.
In mid-June, the TechXLR8 multi-genre tech festival took place in London. Although being part of the London Tech Week 2017, it comprised of further eight ‘smaller’ events: 5G World, IoT World Europe, Cloud & DevOps World, Apps World Evolution, VR & AR World, AI & Machine Learning World, Connected Cars & Autonomous Vehicles Europe and Project Kairos.
Since it was, from a global perspective, one of the key industry meetings, PANTHEON.tech could not have missed it. We’ve participated in TechXLR8 Cloud & DevOps World section where we showcased our SDN, ODL and networking skills and know-how: we’ve seen a lot of great things, we’ve managed to acquire interesting contacts with international companies active in telco, content delivery and SDN segments. Products from our portfolio such as SysRepo, ODL, HoneyComb, VPP, FD.io turned out to be really great topics for discussion.
Which keywords did the participants respond to best? Linux Foundation, OpenStack, Docker, Kubernetes, BigData. The demand for Pantheon’s business cards was so high that it caught us by surprise. We even had to ration them on the last day, such was the appetite for PANTHEON.tech!
Every year, Krakow welcomes some of the biggest industry names to talk about Java and everything related. This time, PANTHEON.tech couldn’t miss it.
First day in Krakow
The proverbial long and winding road does exist. It sits between Žilina in northern Slovakia and Polish Krakow. After a couple of hours of tiresome driving, we’ve safely arrived in the city. It was a lonesome journey with only radio Pogoda keeping us company by talking gibberish and playing some traditional Polish songs (also in gibberish). The city of Wypadki is surely a magical place. A place where trucks have voting rights and bikers outnumber pigeons 3 to 1. Unfortunately, there was no time to explore further. We checked-in and prepared a schedule of talks to visit.
Second day survival
GeeCon took place in a well-equipped multiplex near the city centre. As it turned out, the venue was not built for this type of events. The corridors‘ bottleneck started to fill with attendees blocking the passage to talk rooms, and you could have spent the whole breaks standing in line in front of a bathroom.
However, the 2017 GeeCon brought out the big guns right at the beginning. David Moore from Sabre showed us the true meaning of “experience.” Although his talk had a rather bland title “Platform and Product Evolution at Sabre”. He touched a broad spectrum of topics – from organizational structures and their need to reflect the software architecture to his hatred towards “layered-cake” architecture designs.
Next on the schedule were some sub-par talks about Java 9 in general, mixed with some never-ending Docker hype, CUDA computing, and introductory profiling. And then we got the juicy stuff. Milen Dyankov from Liferay was not afraid to speak openly about the state and purpose of Jigsaw, the need for the OSGi, and where it all fits together. Great talk for an audience of all levels of familiarity with modular concepts in Java. And of all genders, of course.
We were really pumped up for Monica Beckwith’s talk boldly called “Java Performance Engineers Survival guide”. The abstract was attractive and her CV was quite impressive: JavaOne rock star, previously working in AMD as performance engineer, then Sun, later at Oracle working on GC. Suffice to say, the expectations were really high. However, this was probably the biggest disappointment of the entire event.
We ended the day with a dry sauna back at the hotel and went to sleep.
Third day with Java and Avast
After such an exhausting first day, we started with a well-prepared soft-skills talk promising to improve our client presentations, only to continue with the trend of microservices and reactive programming. Right before lunch, Jarosław Pałka showed us the magic of bytecode. It stood up to the high anticipations and made us want to –javaagent something.
Avast people demonstrated how to utilize Docker in production and Marcin Grzejszczak explained the idea behind consumer-driven contracts of APIs. This certainly got our attention and we will consider it for future projects.
After Steve Poole’s light talk about Java vulnerabilities, we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the biggest IT party of the year. A large club located inside an old fort hosted geeks the entire night and they seriously did show their mad dancing skills, as you can see in the photo.
Fourth day, after the party
The morning after the party, waking up was a bit more painful. We ate the breakfast quickly and checked out.
Even though the party was hard, the audience listened carefully at the first presentation about interrupted exception. We decided to fork us and take a part at different presentations. To the roots of JVM – Java native runtime and another hype – Akka (full auditorium with no spare room left). Later on, we continued with some general JavaScript and JPA lectures.
We joined together at the presentation called “Distributed systems explained (with NodeJS)”, given by Bruno Bossola. Our long-standing question on how to do testing properly was answered by Anton Arhipov – TestContainers.
There was a great presentation about code generation and the reasons why we should generate configurations instead of code at the very end of the conference. Here we felt as if the future was already here. Rod Johnson presented Atomist – a bot for Slack.
Thank you to PANTHEON.tech and to the organizers of GeeCon for this amazing experience.
PANTHEON.tech is proud to announce that we’ve become a Silver Sponsor of the Automotive Linux Summit, which will be taking place at Tokyo Conference Center Ariake from May 31 till June 2, 2017. In practice, this means more visibility for our brand plus a lot of networking potential. Which equals great potential for meeting new customers.
The Automotive Linux Summit is a one-of-a-kind event where automotive innovators meet with Linux ninjas, research & development managers and business executives. The result? Connecting developers with their peers and vendors, driving innovation towards the automotive future.
With PANTHEON.tech’s background, skills and global plans, this is a place where we naturally belong.
The PyConSK 2017 conference took place at Slovak University of Technology’s Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies in Bratislava over the weekend from March 10th to 12th.
First day & its challenges
The first day, the Slovak Day took place. The presentations in the large auditorium were focused not only on Python, but also on Robot Framework, artificial intelligence, Open Data, e-government and many other topics. Presentations in the Small auditorium discussed education, elaborating on best practices in teaching Python at high schools.
The presentation “Alternative Methods of Running Tests and Evaluation of their Results” gave a good insight into using test suites and their interpretation. Another interesting presentation was “Custom Python Libraries for Robot Framework,” which was an inviting introduction to Robot framework for beginners. Another two presentations caught our attention: the first one, by Exponea’s Jožo Kováč, was rather more serious.
In “How can Artificial Intelligence in Python Help a Company Grow?” he gave examples of AI’s benefits for e-commerce. The second one, and also the last presentation of the first day, was the funniest of the whole conference. Speaker Michal Kaukič shone out from others by his excellent sense of humor on the topic, which was otherwise boring – “Graphics in Jupyter Notebooks.” He did not give us much opportunities to fall asleep, as twenty per cent of the time the whole auditorium was laughing.
Second day & Django Girls
Saturday’s presentations were mostly in English. The first one was given by Pavel Serbajlo: “What Makes Silicon Valley Software Developers Special?” Since he spent over 4 years in the USA, he knew what he was talking about. It was interesting for all of us to hear what the values in Silicon Valley are, how people work, communicate, commute and how they live.
Other two presentations, “Making Monitoring Boring” and “Building Data Pipelines with Python” were presentations which I definitely wanted to hear due to personal interest in data mining and Linux administration.
The lunch break was a perfect time to establish new contacts, or simply talk to each other while enjoying a great meal. There were several sponsors booths representing RedHat, Fedora, Mozilla, Exponea, Kiwi, Eset, Kistler and others.
After the lunch break, I attended an interesting presentation, “From Code to Community,” which was focused on a community and its ability to organize not only smaller meet-ups, but also bigger conferences like PyCon.DE. The last speaker that day, Adrian Holovaty, co-BDFL of the Django web framework, had a humanely-focused speech about the community aspects of open source.
On the event’s third day, Sunday, I briefly visited the Django Girls workshop and shortly after that I went to Code Analysis with Coala sprint. I did not know much about Coala, so I really appreciate that I could learn something new about this great open source project helping developers improving their code quality.
Two presentations in the large auditorium were interesting for me as well. In “Object Calisthenics,” Pawel Lewtak discussed nine steps leading to a better code. He showed us how to use nine rules called Object Calisthenics in order to write the code shorter, more precise, easier to read and easy to test. At “Automating Network Equipment with Python,” by Elisa Jasinska, we could learn about automated access to devices by Cisco, Juniper, Arista and others.
I can recommend such a great conference, as PyCon surely is, to all Python enthusiasts. Videos from the event can be found on YouTube.
On February 5th, we were present at the OPNFV Fast Data Stack on FOSDEM conference that is hosted every year at Brussels’ Université libre de Bruxelles. It was a great gathering of software developers who presented their work in the form of 30-minute presentation. People came not just from Europe, but also oversees and other parts of world. Lectures took place in more than 30 rooms and more than 600 speakers were presenting their projects.
There was a number of interesting lectures not only in the field of networking, but also robotics, neural networks, microprocessors, algorithms and data modeling. Some presenters were members of large teams, some were presenting their own projects. The scope was very wide including almost every programing language one had ever heard about. Visitors could see everything from startups up to trending projects such as Kubernetes, OpenDaylight or OpenStack. Every lecture was recorded and videos can be found on the FOSDEM website. Our presentation was scheduled in the NFV (Network Function Virtualization) section.
About virtualization and networking
Virtualization became very popular over the last years. Virtual machines curb the need for physical resources and make data centers more flexible and accessible. Today’s servers are really powerful and therefore able of hosting many VMs. This shed a new point of view on networking and, as a response, it got virtualized too in the form of virtual forwarders – processes capable of forwarding traffic within a hosting machine. OVS and VPP are the popular technologies these days and both support a very powerful set of data plane libraries and network interface controller drivers for fast packet processing, called DPDK. You may think of VPP and OVS as virtual forwarders between physical NICs and the virtual machines.
What is OPNFV Fast Data Stack?
OPNFV FDS makes it easier to maintain complicated data center environments. It’s a complex multilayer suite that includes software components designed for creating virtual machines and forwarding traffic. All the components are built with Apex installer on given set of host machines that need to match demanding performance needs and have a basic connectivity as well. As a result, a complex stack is created, providing a rich user-interface to network operators. The input exposes abstract set of tools for managing the life cycle of network, virtual machines and policies across given nodes.
Under the hood
Let’s have a look on key components of the OPNFV FDS suite. As mentioned above, multiple components operate at different layers of the stack. Each component participates in transforming defined abstraction to an actual configuration for underlying infrastructure. On top of the stack resides OpenStack. This software is known for its scalability, loads of plugins and vast community. FDS uses OpenStack for managing VMs and for defining forwarding topology and policy rules. Forwarding inputs can be characterized by elements such as networks, subnets, routers or ports. Policy inputs by security groups and security group rules. One layer bellow is the OpenDaylight controller, also popular for its community, and plugins.
In the OPNFV FDS setup, it is used as a controller unit that consumes OpenStack’s abstractions and applies it to an underlying infrastructure using OpenDaylight’s Group Based Policy plugin. When the plugin detects that a policy can be resolved for at least two endpoints, configuration is generated and flushed to forwarders. OPNFV FDS setup, presented on FOSDEM, is using VPP in the hypervisor to forward packets between physical NICs and the VMs.
VPP, Vector Packet Processing, is a virtual switching/routing technology operating at a very impressive rate. It is impressively fast thanks to the DPDK library and CPU cache optimizing techniques. The beauty of Vector Packet Processing is that instead of handling packets one by one, VPP will perform one micro-operation after another to a group of packets which performs better with heavy load and results in increased throughput. VPP exposes C APIs and CLI for configuration. However, it’s not yet possible to use C API remotely because VPP does not run any management client. Therefore, Honeycomb is used in the setup to provide NETCONF interface for the VPP forwarder. OpenDaylight uses NETCONF to talk to a HC Agent.
Supported scenarios
The FDS Demo presented on FOSEDEM showed the L2 scenario, meaning that L2 traffic is passed via VXLAN tunnels between the nodes. Traffic is routed on centralized node and routing is not performed by VPP itself, but by the OpenStack Qrouter service that is interconnected into every L2 domain in VPP via tap ports. NAT and routing towards external networks is also done by Qrouter.
Moving forward, FDS project is also looking at the L3 scenarios, where routing could be either distributed or centralized and will be done by VPP process together with NAT. All this efforts need attention on every layer of the stack including Apex installer.
Conclusion
We were pleased to present the FDS project at the FOSDEM conference. We believe that OPNFV FDS is a key component in network virtualization with a very bright future. For more information about the setup, and project itself, please visit this page.