Faucet: Enterprise OpenFlow in production

Remember OpenFlow? It was the media and marketing darling for the better part of 5 years as “the machine” conflated OpenFlow with SDN and SDN with - almost literally - everything. “Still Does Nothing” was a common phrase uttered around those of us that had run large scale, complex networks for a long time. Quietly, and mostly, out of the fickle media and blogosphere eye, a scrappy little SDN project called faucet has been diligently plugging away– making easy to use, production quality, well documented, and very stable code that runs OpenFlow networks quite happily in production and at scale.

SDN across domains in the WAN – a novice look

There has been a flurry of discussion on SDN in the WAN lately, specifically, why and how. Brent Salsbury laid out a few use cases here. The why seems pretty straightforward. I do believe it will happen, however, the how is the interesting part. Admittedly, I’m a tad of a greenhorn in the SDN space, I’ve made it work in a lab, I participate as much as I can in the working groups and I attempt (poorly) to keep up.