Chris Cummings

Network Orchestration is a defining factor in next generation networks, enabling operators to deliver more consistent and reliable services. Using the collaboratively developed Workflow Orchestrator and other commercial and open source tools, ESnet has been able to successfully Orchestrate and Automate network configuration deployment for large swaths of the ESnet6 network. This approach has enabled rapid deployment of new network services, as well as ensuring that configuration standards are well enforced when deploying network services. During this talk, we will provide a brief history of automation at ESnet, Introduce The Workflow Orchestrator, dive into what our goals were for orchestration and automation in the ESnet6 project, describe the technology and process that we used to meet those goals, and then provide a live demonstration of ESnet’s orchestration tooling in action. Finally, we will discuss the lessons we learned along the way while developing this tooling, providing time for Q&A.

Getting started with Network Orchestration is a daunting task that requires a lot of forethought and domain knowledge. Join this interactive full-day technical workshop to benefit from ESnet and SURF network and software engineers who have already gone through this process and are ready to share their knowledge.

A development environment will be provided, you just need to bring a laptop with a working docker setup and an IDE (preferably PyCharm or VSCode). The workshop will begin with introductions to product and workflow modeling with the Workflow Orchestrator and then move to interactive development sessions, finally ending with an open discussion around tailoring the orchestrator to your use-cases.

Network Orchestration is a defining factor in next generation networks, enabling operators to deliver more consistent and reliable services. Using the collaboratively developed Workflow Orchestrator and other commercial and open source tools, ESnet has been able to successfully Orchestrate and Automate network configuration deployment for large swaths of the ESnet6 network. This approach has enabled rapid deployment of new network services, as well as ensuring that configuration standards are well enforced when deploying network services.

During this talk, we will provide a brief history of automation at ESnet, Introduce The Workflow Orchestrator, dive into what our goals were for orchestration and automation in the ESnet6 project, describe the technology and process that we used to meet those goals, and then provide a live demonstration of ESnet’s orchestration tooling in action. Finally, we will discuss the lessons we learned along the way while developing this tooling, providing time for Q&A.

P4 has taken off as a powerful language for high-performance network applications, however, it is a limited language by design. Due to these limits, many P4 applications require a “slow” path for more complex packet manipulation. In this presentation we explore the use of DPDK as a component of P4 applications in conjunction with the ESnet SmartNIC platform. Drawing from our experience building a P4-based SIIT-DC NAT64 translator on FPGAs, this presentation explores how DPDK can be leveraged to offload complex and variable-length packet manipulation functions from the P4 datapath to a general-purpose CPU. While P4 offers the tools to quickly develop Legacy IP to IPv6 translations that perform at 100Gbps line rates, we encountered challenges when dealing with complex packet translations like ICMP responses. Accordingly, we punt those more intricate, but less frequently used, translations to a DPDK side-car application. Join us as we delve into the architecture of our NAT64 translation application and demonstrate the development flow used for integrating these tools together.

Side meeting at TNC to provide updates and discuss potential collaboration opportunities in intercontinental connectivity between R&E networks and automation/orchestration.

Getting started with Network Orchestration is a daunting task that requires a lot of forethought and domain knowledge. Join this interactive full-day technical workshop to benefit from ESnet and SURF network and software engineers who have already gone through this process and are ready to share their knowledge. A remote development environment will be provided, you just need to bring a laptop with an SSH client and an IDE (preferably PyCharm or VSCode). The workshop will begin with introductions to product and workflow modeling with The Orchestrator and then move to interactive development sessions, finally ending with an open discussion around tailoring the orchestrator to your use-cases.

Join leaders from Internet2, ESnet, and CENIC as they discuss network orchestration. Network orchestration is a defining factor in next-generation networks, enabling operators to deliver more consistent and reliable services. ESnet has leveraged a combination of internally developed tools, open-source software, and commercial software to orchestrate and automate network configuration deployment. This approach has enabled rapid deployment of new network services and ensured that configuration standards are well enforced when deploying network services. Karl Newell will describe Internet2's work in this area, including their work with Cisco NSO, the deployment of 400G networks, and the platforms they are actively using. Robert Kwon will detail the efforts CENIC has underway. During this talk, panelists will provide a brief history of automation in their organizations, describe their goals for orchestration and automation, describe the technology and process used to meet those goals, and provide demonstrations of their orchestration tooling.

Intent-based networking is something that has a lot of mystique and buzz-words surrounding it. This talk explores the approach that ESnet took to build our service orchestration software suite as well as giving a few demonstrations of the software in action. This presentation is not an exhaustive explanation of how to build your own intent-based networking environment, but rather an example and overview of a real-world stack that is being used in a production network today and the principles behind it.