whoami• Matthew Wallace (@mattwallace),

Director of Product Development, ViaWest• ~19 years technology experience;

managed services, security, web applications, cloud – ViaWest, VMware, Exodus, etc.

• Co-author, Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise Against Attack (Wiley, May 2012)

Background: ViaWest

• 27 Data Centers and Counting• Metro Fiber and Long-Haul Backbone• Multiple Cloud Locations• Extensive utilization of NFV• Some experience with overlay networking

Some of our SDN needs:• Increasing need for flexibility• Mitigating impact of hardware

refresh cycles on the ability to innovate

• Connecting colocation environments to cloud environments on demand

Developer-Oriented Thinking

• Developers need networking… like I need my air conditioner to work

• Developers are under demand to make applications elastic, portable, resilient

Network Team Thinking

Developer Needs & Thinking

ISP thinking

• Manageability

– Programmatic Correctness

– Visibility

– Fault Isolation

• Cost

• Flexibility

• Correct Scaling

– Right-sized for each customer

The Land SDN Forgot

• NFV appliances sometimes lack the same ability as physical to debug; e.g. promiscuous mode

• “Appliances” make it difficult to use your typical tools (e.g., installing a Nimbus probe on a virtual firewall)

• The focus on technology yields people problems sometimes

Your Business Model Stinks

Dear Vendors,

• Charging nearly identical costs for NFV appliances and physical

• Inflexible licensing (this is the cloud; stop making me pick Mbp/s or connections/sec ahead of time!)

• I’m not committing to your whole product line because I want one thing. Standards. APIs.

Let’s Talk about Multi-TenancyRule #1: Someone’s always got to be different

Rule #2: The odds of successfully scheduling a maintenance window are inversely proportional to the number of approvers

Rule #3: The number of authentication schemes needed for any service is roughly [Number of Tenants + 1]

Rule #4: We’d rather not build a portal for your product

Rule #5 (Corollary to #4): Yes, we need a portal for your product

Rule #6: The ability of organizations to grow complexity will outpace your ability to imagine the organizational complexity addressed by your product

Let’s talk APIs and SDKs

• “Does your UI use your API?”

– If your answer is no, you are doing it wrong.

• APIs are like belly buttons

• Well-organized and well-built APIs make development easy. Since that’s true, have lots of SDKs (and sample code!)

– Diverse skillsets => Unpredictable language specialties

• Smaller, modifiable portals/portlets are [VERY] preferable to monolithic closed apps

Speaking of APIs and SDKs…

• If you have “engineer” or “architect” in your title, you should learn to code – we need this skillset + your domain knowledge!

• Software development is now an incredibly deep field, but everything you learn pays dividends – learn a little at a time

Interoperability

• Rapid Change is Great

• Innovation, exciting work

• Interoperability suffers

• The Internet was built on standards

• Your product generally doesn’t become a platform without either:

– A standard

– Dominance