The advantages of deploying lighty.io in Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM)

The DCIM market is continuing to evolve and large enterprises continue to be the primary adopters of new DCIM software solutions. The goal of a DCIM software initiative is to provide administrators the ability to identify, locate, visualize, and manage all physical data center assets with a holistic view.

PANTHEON.tech has developed lighty.io based on OpenDaylight in Java SE. It is a great software for implementation of customized DCIM solutions such as SDN controller, NFV orchestrator or VNF management etc.

Some of the great features, you will benefit from while managing your data center are listed below.

Model-driven approach

lighty.io implements a model-driven approach to data center infrastructure management. Because of the common models being used, intercommunication of configurational, operational, monitoring and telemetry data in all the parts of the systems becomes possible which are based on lighty.io.

These models define structure, syntax, and semantics of the data processed by each part of the system. Usage of standardized models by vendors (e.g., models from OpenConfig or IETF) leads to seamless migration from one vendor to another.

Scalability and controller hierarchy

• Horizontal scalability – lighty.io supports clustering. A feature, which allows horizontal scaling of the system by adding more instances (nodes) of the controller into a cluster
• Controller hierarchy – NB plugins of lighty.io allow the implementation of upper layer applications running as micro services and performing operations using the controller’s NB plugin API. It is also possible to design a hierarchy of controllers where the upper layer controller(s) performs operations using the lower layer controller’s NB plugins. One of the implemented NB plugins is a plugin that implements the NETCONF protocol. Using this NB plugin in the hierarchy of controllers makes possible to manage the lower layer controllers as NETCONF devices.

Security

lighty.io is implemented in Java, which is in nature a Type-Safe programming language. Type safety leads to more secure software than other software written e.g., in C/C++, while reaching a good performance. The model-driven approach and the source code generation also support software security.

These features minimize the possibility of error in the code by implementing the requirement of the verification of the input data from external applications and connected devices. Cyphering, authorization, and usage of these certificates are the matter of course.

Legacy and heterogeneous systems support

lighty.io implements the main SDN standards e.g., NETCONF, RESTCONF, YANG. Moreover, the legacy technologies that are already implemented in lighty.io makes SNMP southbound plugin possible. This shows that the capability of lighty.io being used not only in green-field deployments (implementing the system from scratch) but also brown-field deployments where it is needed to manage a heterogeneous set of networking devices.

Extensibility

As a software design principle, the model-driven approach speeds up and simplifies implementation of extensions with the architecture of lighty.io results in great extensibility. The architecture of the lighty.io defines Northbound – NB and Southbound – SB plugins implementations as a model-driven module.

NB & SB Plugins

NB plugins enable the communication of the controller with the upper layer applications. Such as dashboards, upper layer controllers, interDC orchestrators etc. The upper layer applications can be implemented as an external service or as a native module of the controller.

The upper layer applications mostly implement application logic, business logic, administration interfaces, data analytics, data transformation etc. NB plugins can be used to:

• submit commands to the SDN controller,
• send notifications to upper layers by the controller,
• send telemetry data to upper layers by the controller,
• monitor the controller by upper layers,
• read the operational data of the controller and devices orchestrated by the controller,
• the configuration of the controller itself or specific device orchestrated by the
  controller.

SB plugins implement protocols and technologies extending the SDN controller capabilities with new standards and technologies allowing connections of new network devices. SB plugins can be used for:

• the configuration of networking devices,
• fetching operational (state) data of the networking devices,
• receiving telemetry data,
• monitoring of devices,
• submitting commands to the devices,
• receiving notifications from devices.

Models and model-driven approach simplify the implementation of new plugins and upper layer applications because the usage of these models allows source code generation of classes (OOP construct) and related code which verifies the syntax and semantics of the data minimizes the probability of errors in implementation caused by human interactions.

If you would like to know more about lighty.io and how it could improve your business, visit lighty.io or our Product Page.

lighty.io is a Software Development Kit (SDK) which provides components for the development of Software Defined Networking (SDN) controllers, based on commonly used standards in the networking industry. We have used our experience from the OpenDaylight (ODL) to create lighty.io, which will empower you to simply develop, integrate and deploy a tailored SDN controller.

An SDN controller plays an essential role as an orchestrator of networking infrastructure in 5G networks. It is used not only for the configuring and monitoring of the physical routers and switches, but also for managing virtual networks of Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers. Among many great benefits of an SDN controller (or set of interconnected SDN controllers) is that it has a holistic view of the network. An SDN controller is also used for connecting User Equipment (UE) or Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) to data centers and enables technologies such as network slicing and edge computing to be used in the 5G.

Network slicing requires the ability of configuration and monitoring of all networking devices (physical or virtual) along the path of the traffic. For edge computing purposes, it is necessary to automate the configuration of the devices in order to support 5G scenarios such as UE registration. The SDN controller enables technologies such as network slicing and edge computing to be used in 5G.

Figure 1: Overview of a 5G network architecture

Figure 1 (above) shows how the SDN controller based on lighty.io uses southbound plugins to read and write configuration and state of networking devices of WAN network and physical or virtual networks in data centers both core and at the edge.

lighty.io supports many south-bound protocols for network orchestration, such as NETCONF and RESTCONF protocol plugins.  The number of vendors and devices supporting these protocols grow every year. We believe that many devices and appliances in Radio, Edge, and WAN will speak these protocols in the 5G era. lighty.io also contains Pantheon’s SNMP SB plugin for integration with legacy systems, and for heterogeneous environments where the old and the new mix.

The modular architecture of lighty.io allows adding new plugin implementations to other protocols. lighty.io exposes the configurational and operational data of all the devices to an upper layer where a business logic of administration and automation applications can be implemented. The APIs can also be accessed remotely via the REST API and other communication methods can also be implemented as northbound plugins. These upper layer applications can be designed as micro services or as a part of the SDN controller.

Figure 2: An example of a 5G network using FD.io data plane

As mentioned above, it is necessary to use an SDN controller also for orchestration of virtualized networks in data centers. An open source project FD.io is one particular example of using such technology. FD.io implements configurable data plane running in user space level, not in kernel space level. Thanks to this feature, the FD.io data plane can be deployed as an ordinary micro service e.g., as a container. FD.io can be used for interconnection of containers or VMs in data centers and it is possible to orchestrate all of the instances of FD.io by lighty.io based SDN controller.

Figure 3: An example of a 5G network and integration with other IoT networks

Among connecting mobile phones and tablets to the network, 5G will also enable a vast number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to be connected to the internet and to communicate directly with each other. IoT solutions can leverage SDN controllers for similar purposes as other 5G technologies do. Specific VNFs for IoT can be deployed and orchestrated by an SDN controller, whether that be at the edge or in the core data centers. Network slicing could be used for smart cars and smart cities solutions as it is shown in Figure 3(above)

This way the 5G networks will enable adoption of IoT in everyday human life. The number of IoT devices expected to connect to internet in upcoming years is substantial. According to Gartner’s predictions, IoT technology will be in 95 percent of electronics by 2020 [1]. According to another forecast from Cisco, 50 billion devices would connect to the internet by 2020 [2].

Here is a brief summary of features and benefits provided by lighty.io:

• The modular architecture of southbound plugins allows implementation of communication with physical and virtualized networking devices.
• Configurational and operational data of all orchestrated devices is exposed as a northbound plugin for administration, automation and analytics purposes.
• MD-SAL (Model Driven Software Abstraction Layer) – provides data store and services to be used by other parts of SDN controller such as southbound and northbound plugins. The data processed by MD-SAL are modeled in YANG modeling
• NETCONF and RESTCONF southbound plugins are available and field-tested.
• SNMP plugin for integration with legacy systems is also available.
• NETCONF protocol can be used by lighty.io for orchestration of FD.io data plane to interconnect VMs or cloud-native applications in data centers.
• lighty.io has a light weight hardware footprint, hence responds promptly.
• lighty.io is ready for micro service environment.
• lighty.io provides faster and cheaper testing and CI.
• lighty.io is an easy tool to develop and deploy SDN in 5G networking infrastructures.

Ready to test how lighty.io works? Send us an email at sales@lighty.io and we will provide you with a trial version.

Resources:

[1] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-strategic-predictions-for-2018-and-beyond/

[2] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac79/docs/innov/IoT_IBSG_0411FINAL.pdf

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.

Daša Šimková

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.

Martin Bobák
Technical Leader

The IETF 100 Hackathon wrapped up several weeks ago in steamy Singapore. Over two hundred participants spent the weekend on November 11^th – 12^th 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.

Our idea and testing

If you have never seen this YouTube video on IPv6, you really should.

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.

Our team at the hackathon.

IPv6-IPv4 transition technology interop presentation is available here and NAT64 testing here.

Our team won the “Best Input for the Scotch BoF to the universal deployment of IPv6” award.

Matúš Fabian