CloudEXPO 2019

In the Era of Digital Transformation, It’s Time for Enterprise Networking to Embrace Cloud Architectures

We are in the midst of the era of Digital Transformation. Cloud computing has become synonymous with computing. We believe that cloud networking will, within the next 24 months, become the new vernacular for networking. The same paradigm shift that has revolutionized computing will transform networking.Over time, monolithic architecture moved into client/server architectures, which then evolved into service-oriented architectures, which has in turn given way to the now ubiquitous microservices/container model. This microservices architecture is the mainstay of cloud and public cloud computing, as well as serverless/utility computing models. The benefits to cloud software architectures are many, including horizontal scale, distributed services and databases, fault tolerance and containerization and programming language independence to name a few. 
It is these attributes that we see are for the most part in the large, global SaaS applications such as Amazon’s e-commerce website, Netflix’s streaming service, Facebook and Twitter’s social networks. The same capabilities – with the same global, highly available, and horizontal scale – can be applied to enterprise networking.

As we know, the heart of networking is routing. Interestingly, routing algorithms have maintained the exact same architecture for 30 years. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP4), the routing protocol for the Internet, has been in use since 1994, and has been virtually untouched. These protocols are designed for resiliency and autonomous operation. Even so, there are challenges with the architecture and protocols – most significant is that of Internet performance. Issues with scaling and convergence plague BGP operations, and there have been proposals to replace it altogether. But that has proven impossible due to the massive global installed base. However, the fastest solution and next best option is to augment BGP.

As the industry ramps up digital transformation with AI, ML, IoT and other new technologies, the Internet needs to keep up with the demand and be able to scale, automate and perform.
Building atop BGP4’s flat, decentralized architecture, new routing protocols are leveraging cloud software architectures to develop fast, scalable, and performance-driven routing protocols, embracing both the centralized and the distributed nature of cloud computing.

In this session, we’ll look at the augmentation of BGP using performance feedback loops and centralized orchestration in order to deliver consistent high throughput, mitigate packet loss, and reduce latency.