Qiuyu Xiao is a Ph.D. student in the department of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During the summer of 2018, he was an intern in the Open vSwitch team at VMware. This episode is a talk that Qiuyu gave at the end of his internship, describing his work on encrypted tunnels for OVN. The slides that accompanied ...…

This episode, recorded in April 2018, was the third in a series of internal VMware tech talks about Open vSwitch. This episode is particularly about OVSDB, the Open vSwitch Database, and particularly about OVSDB from the viewpoint of the client. It talks about the C client library, including how it represents data, the usual way to work with it ...…

Qiuyu Xiao is a PhD student studying computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This episode is a talk that Qiuyu gave at VMware in May. It is based on the paper “Personalized Pseudonyms for Servers in the Cloud,” by Qiuyu Xiao, Michael K. Reiter, and Yinqian Zhangyinqian, originally published in 2017 at Proceedings on ...…

Ansis Atteka is a developer on the Open vSwitch team at VMware. This episode is a recording of a talk that Ansis gave at VMware in May. He covers techniques for debugging on Linux, in particular how to trace through processes using strace, trace-cmd, and other tools. You may want to follow along with Ansis's slides. You can contact Ansis at aat ...…

Matt Layher and Armando Migliaccio are engineers focusing on networking at DigitalOcean, a cloud service provider. In April, Justin Pettit and I sat down with them at DigitalOcean HQ in New York City. This episode is our discussion, which ranges from how DO first began using Open vSwitch, the DO approach to network control, to scale and perform ...…

Paul Chaignon is a grad student at Orange and Inria. In this episode, Paul talks about Oko: Extending Open vSwitch with Stateful Filters, a paper written with co-authors Kahina Lazri, Jérôme François, Thibault Delmas, and Olivier Festor. Paul presented this research at SOSR '18 in March 2018. The paper has the following abstract: With the Softw ...…

Han Zhou is an architect working on highly scalable and reliable SDN solutions for eBay's cloud infrastructure. He is an active contributor in OpenStack and OVS/OVN. Before eBay, he has been working in networking area for more than 10 years in Cisco and Nokia. In OVN, the ovn-controller daemon runs on each hypervisor. It obtains logical flows f ...…

Leonid Ryzhyk is a senior researcher in the VMware Research Group. The main theme of his work is applying formal methods to build better operating systems and networks. Before joining VMware, Leonid received his PhD from University of New South Wales and NICTA. Leonid has also worked as a researcher at NICTA, as a postdoc at University of Toron ...…

Alex Ellis founded and leads the OpenFaaS project, which is an open source implementation of a serverless framework. This episode is an interview with Alex. We talk about serverless functions and OpenFaaS, how OpenFaaS compares to other serverless frameworks, how networking works in OpenFaaS, open source communities, and other related topics. W ...…

This is the third in a series of Open vSwitch tech talks that we are starting to run internally at VMware every week or two. This episode is about flow translation, the process that OVS follows when a packet arrives in the software switch that does not match any already established entry in the OVS datapath cache (the megaflow cache). The trans ...…

This is the second in a series of Open vSwitch tech talks that we are starting to run internally at VMware every week or two. This episode is particularly about OVSDB, the Open vSwitch Database. It starts out with material explaining why OVSDB exists at all, given that there is so much other work in databases and in network configuration. Then ...…

This is the first in a series of Open vSwitch tech talks that we are starting to run internally at VMware every week or two. This episode is particularly about read-copy-update, or RCU for short, which is a synchronization technique that allows reads to be very cheap (almost free), with some memory cost. This talk covers reasons why RCU can be ...…

This is a talk that I gave at an internal VMware event called "Open Source Day" in February. I prepared it as a kind of internal recognition of the ACM SOSR conference awarding Open vSwitch its Software Systems Award. It goes over a history of Open vSwitch and the motivation behind it, factors that led to its success, and some of the project's ...…

Greg Ferro is one of the Packet Pushers, a host of much more popular podcasts than this one. Greg's bio says: Greg survived 25+ years of Enterprise IT as a network engineer, architect and designer. Involved with a wide range of companies in gaming, online, finance, carriers, energy and other, he was a team member or leader that designed, built ...…

Henry Xu is an assistant professor in the computer science department at the City University of Hong Kong, where he leads the NetX Lab. In this episode, we discuss the research behind his group's recent paper Network Stack as a Service in the Cloud, presented at HotNets 2017. The paper has the following abstract: The tenant network stack is imp ...…

This episode features Andy Gospodarek, a Principal Engineer at Broadcom, where he works as a software architect on the NICs team. This interview, recorded at the DPDK summit in San Jose on November 15, 2017, focuses on his team's work on offloading flows to Broadcom NICs, using the user's choice of the Linux “TC” flow offload API or a Broadcom- ...…

Andrew Ruthven, aka “Puck”, is a Data Centre Manager at Catalyst IT, a New Zealand open source specialist IT company whose services include operating an OpenStack based public cloud. This episode is based on “Open Compute Project, down under”, a talk that Andrew gave at OpenStack Sydney, which had the following abstract: This talk will review t ...…

This is a recording of a talk given by Ben Pfaff at the OpenStack Summit in Sydney on Monday, Nov. 6, with the follow abstract: The Open vSwitch (OVS) community recently released version 2.8. The release includes updates to both OVS and OVN (Open Virtual Network), which provides virtual networking for OVS. This presentation will primarily focus ...…

Brad Cowie is a member of the WAND Network Research Group at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand. He is also a core member of the Faucet project which develops an open source OpenFlow controller for enterprise networks, which he uses to build production OpenFlow networks. This episode is a recording of a talk that Brad gave at t ...…

Chang Kim is an engineer at Barefoot Networks, where he has been intimately involved in the design of the P4 domain-specific language for controlling a network data plane. Whereas the control and management planes in a network system are general-purpose software implemented on CPUs, the data plane in a high-speed network is typically implemente ...…

Tony van der Peet is Chief Architect at Allied Telesis. In this episode, he speaks about using OpenFlow on Allied Telesis networking hardware for enterprise SDN. The Allied Telesis implementation of OpenFlow is based on Open vSwitch. According to Tony: “We've tried really from the word `go' to develop the most generic OpenFlow switch that we ca ...…

Leonid Ryzhyk is a senior researcher at VMware Research in Palo Alto. He focuses on applying formal methods to improve operating systems and networks. This episodes discusses Cocoon-2, a system that Leonid is building to automate the tedious tasks involved in SDN programming. One problem that it aims to solve is incrementality, that is, the nee ...…

Bhargava Shastry is a Ph.D. student in the Chair for Security in Telecommunications at Technical University Berlin. Bhargava develops tools that enable early detection and fixing of security vulnerabilities. Among other topics, this episode discusses Bhargava's paper “Static Exploration of Taint-Style Vulnerabilities Found by Fuzzing,” which wa ...…

Nicholas Gray is a PhD student at the University of Würzburg, Germany, where he also completed his Master's thesis in 2015. His research interests include SDN/NFV architectures and their impact on network security. Thomas Zinner received his Diploma and Ph.D degrees in computer science from the University of Wurzburg, Germany, in 2007 and 2012, ...…

Dave and Harry are developers who work at Intel on DPDK, the Data Plane Development Kit, which is a library for high-performance packet processing in userspace. This episode is an introduction to DPDK, its history, status, and its future, and how it relates to Open vSwitch and the DPDK datapath included in Open vSwitch. OVS Orbit is produced by ...…

Howard is an IT standards engineer at Huawei. He has been working on open source for about 6 years and attended the early Open vSwitch conferences, including the earliest one held at Cisco in 2014. In this episode of OVS Orbit, Howard talks about the OpenStack Cyborg project in OpenStack, which was formerly called Nomad. Howard is the “caretaki ...…

Ahmed El-Hassany is a second-year Ph.D. student at ETH Zürich, who researches ways to make networks more programmable and to verify the correctness of programmable networks. I caught up with Ahmed at SOSR, the Symposium on SDN Research, where he presented BigBug: Practical Concurrency Analysis for SDN, a paper that he authored along with Roman ...…

Fulvio Risso is an associate professor at Politecnico di Torino in Turin, Italy. His research is in the area of high-speed (10+ Gbps) packet processing and especially in programmable networks. This interview was prompted by Fulvio's presentation “A Control and Management Plane for IO Modules” at the IO Visor Summit held on Feb. 27 in Mountain V ...…

Jun Xiao is the founder and CTO of CloudNetEngine, which is focused on innovating a next generation “engine” for cloud virtual networking. He has over 15 years experience in VMware, Huawei, Lucent, Sun Microsystem, and other companies. His system design experience ranges from low-level device drivers and network stacks to middleware and distrib ...…

Han Zhou is an architect working on highly scalable and reliable SDN solutions for eBay's cloud infrastructure. He is an active contributor in OpenStack and OVS/OVN. Before eBay, he has been working in networking area for more than 10 years in Cisco and Nokia. This episode is a talk that Han gave at OpenStack Boston during the Open vSwitch Open ...…

Russell Bryant is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He was on the OpenStack Technical Committee from Fall 2012 until Fall 2016 and was elected to serve on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Russell has been contributing to the development of OpenStack since the Fall of 2011. His most signifi ...…

Sugesh Chandran is a network software engineer with Intel. His work is primarily focused on accelerated software switching solutions in user space running on Intel architecture. His contributions to Open vSwitch with DPDK include tunneling acceleration and enabling hardware acceleration. Before joining Intel, he has been involved in developing ...…

This episode is a series of 3 lightning talks given at OpenStack Boston during the Open vSwitch Open Source Day on May 10. The first speaker is Joe Stringer, a developer at VMware who works on Open vSwitch. The title of his talk, which starts at 1:03, is “Deploying an OVS-based feature switch in 5 minutes or less.” It consists of a demo showing ...…

Alessandro is CTO of Cloudbase Solutions, a company focused on cloud computing interoperability and the main contributor of all the OpenStack Windows and Hyper-V components in Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Ceilometer and Heat since the Folsom release. Alin is a developer at Cloudbase who describes himself as an Open Source enthusiast and a passionate ...…

Panda is a PhD candidate in the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley. In this episode, we discuss the paper “NetBricks: Taking the V out of NFV,” by Panda, Sangjin Han, Keon Jang, Melvin Walls, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker, which was published in OSDI 2016. The abstract for the paper is: The move from har ...…

Bingzhe Liu is a first-year PhD student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this episode, we discuss the paper “NEAt: Network Error Auto-Correct,” by Wenxuan Zhou, Jason Croft, Bingzhe Liu, and Matthew Caesar, which Bingzhe presented on April 4 at SOSR, the Symposium on SDN Research. The abstract for this paper is: Configuring and ...…

This episode's guest is Rupa Dachere, an engineer at VMware and the executive director and founder of CodeChix, a 501(c)3 charity dedicated to education, advocacy and mentoring of women engineers in industry and academia. Rupa founded CodeChix because she found that, regardless of where she worked in the computer industry, she was the only woma ...…

This episode's guests are Bruce Davie, a vice president CTO for APJ at VMware, and Chandra Appanna, an engineer and manager at Arista, who are two of the designers of the Open vSwitch database schema that can be used to control VXLAN forwarding in top-of-rack switches, often called the OVSDB VTEP schema. The discussion in this episode is relate ...…

Omer Anson is a software developer at Huawei. I caught up with him at OpenStack Barcelona back in October to talk about the Dragonflow project, which is a distributed SDN controller for OpenStack Neutron that supports logical switching and routing and more advanced features. According to Omer, Dragonflow distinguishes itself from other Neutron ...…

Jean Tourrilhes is a networking researcher at HPE Labs who served as the chair of the Open Networking Foundation's OpenFlow standardization working group (the “extensibility” working group) from its inception until 2015. Justin Pettit, who was a founding employee at Nicira and who has continued to work at VMware since it acquired Nicira in 2012 ...…

Minlan Yu is an associate professor of computer science at Yale and before that at USC. She works in several areas that are relevant to Open vSwitch, including network virtualization and software-defined networking, enterprise and data center networks, and distributed systems. We begin by talking about ACM SIGCOMM 2017 1st International Worksho ...…

Nate Foster is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and a Visiting Researcher at Barefoot Networks. The goal of his research is developing programming languages and tools for building reliable systems. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009, an MPhil in History and Philosoph ...…

Brenden Blanco is one of the most prolific developers working on the IO Visor Project, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Brenden was an employee at PLUMgrid, the startup behind IO Visor, until it was acquired by VMware. The interview begins with a history of the layers that stacked up to form IO Visor. The history begins with the public ...…

This episode is a recording of a talk that Dave Lenrow gave at the Stanford Platform Lab Fall Seminar on Dec. 6. Dave is Chief Architect for Next Generation Data Center and Distinguished Engineer at Huawei. He participates in a wide variety of open source networking projects including ONOS, Open Daylight, OPNFV, opensourcesdn.org, and Open-O. H ...…

Guru Shetty has been working at VMware, and before that at Nicira, since about 2011. Guru has done a lot of work to integrate Open vSwitch with various platforms. This episode is a conversation with Guru primarily about integrating Open vSwitch and OVN with multiple container systems, including Docker and Kubernetes. Guru begins by reiterating ...…

Ryo Nakamura is a PhD student at The University of Tokyo, studying IP networking, overlay networking, and network operation. This episode is a recording I made of his talk during APSys 2016, the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems, on Aug. 5, based on Protocol-Independent FIB Architecture for Network Overlays, written with co-authors Yohei Kuga (f ...…

Faucet is an open source SDN controller developed by a community that includes engineers at Google's New Zealand office, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and others. This episode is an interview with Josh Bailey from Google and Shivaram Mysore from the ONF. It was recorded on Nov. 7, at Open vSwitch 2016 Fall Conference. The episode begins ...…

OVN is a network virtualization system that has been under development as part of the Open vSwitch project over about the last two years. On this podcast, Ben Pfaff and Russell Bryant, two major contributors to OVN, describe OVN, its architecture, its features, focusing on features that were added in the recent release of Open vSwitch 2.6, and ...…

Yong Xiang is a PhD student at Tsinghua University. This episode is a recording of his talk during APSys 2016, the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems, on Aug. 5, based on Debugging OpenStack Problems Using a State Graph Approach, written with co-authors Hu Li, Sen Wang, Charley Peter Chen, and Wei Xu, which was awarded “best paper” at the confere ...…

Tunneling and encapsulation, with protocols from GRE to Geneve, have been a key part of Open vSwitch since the early days. Jesse Gross, an early employee at Nicira and major contributor to Open vSwitch, and perhaps most importantly the maintainer of the Open vSwitch kernel module, joins this episode of the podcast to talk about this aspect of O ...…