Ahh, so this is really something else
entirely, this is more SDN, Software Defined Networking as the
buzzwords dub it. MS is just putting SDN controller software on
linux as hell, they need it stable, and even they know it wouldn't
be that on windoze.
This is the same as SDN controller products the like of BigSwitch
Floodlight, Juniper OpenContrail, VMware NSX, Cisco ACI, and the
list goes on to build data center network fabrics. Really they
need a way to program switches, software or hardware, to get
"flows" from one place to another. Each and every network
connection is a "flow", so imagine, these are a lot to track,
especially when we're talking in some cases 320gbps paths (4-8x
40gb spine not uncommon now in dc networks, one vendor included
64-way ecmp for amazon).
Software is now (in theory) centralizing how that
switching/routing is determined as people are tired of having to
interlace hardware from 10 different vendors and 20
languages/dialects, across thousands of platforms and modules.
Rather than argue nuances of spanning tree or bgp between cisco,
juniper, arista, and brocade, replace them with a shell script and
a lobotomy.
This is Microsoft's stab at doing so, using the same approach with
things like mq bus, caching, distributed quorums, etc, but now
assuming control of the brains of your network hardware via
OpenFlow spec api to program the hardware for said flows
directly. Things like BGP and Spanning-tree become edge
protocols. Like anyone, they want to insert $switch here, be that
cisco, juniper, avaya, netgear, or huwai, whatever a) meets
requirements, b) costs less, c) lasts longest,
management/compatibility is always the issue, thus lobotomy
becomes attractive and vendor irrelevant.
Even Cisco's SDN solution, ACI really is just existing big modular
hardware switches running linux soc's, tying to linux software
flow controllers, running zmq, reddis and some other things
tracking flow paths and creating redundant paths for ECMP, and
ultimately programming hardware with protocols like isis and lisp
natively still. The rest is just north/south apis, policy
constructs, features for applying sense of everything else that
occurs in a network, including security and application logic.
That's the hard part, making sense of it to users to configure.
Microsoft? Security? Application load balancing? Running your
networking? What could go wrong.
-mb
On 09/18/2015 03:08 PM, Stephen Partington wrote:
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-showcases-the-azure-cloud-switch-acs/
Real deal however.
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