Hyperscale Routing for bare metal switches

Welcome to rtbrick

Sun Microsystems’ famous quote “The network is the computer” served for more than one decade as an inspiration how to design distributed (“Hyperscale”) web applications.

At rtbrick we have always asked ourselves why Hyperscale design principles have never been applied to the domain of networking equipment. We believe by adhering to those principles one can build better switches and routers.

1. Small is beautiful. Build small components, rather than large monolithic systems which are hard to extend and maintain over time. Avoid a big “blast radius” of failing components by keeping things small.
2. Clear separation between I/O, compute and storage. By keeping the three major functional units separate, one can independently engineer software which greatly simplifies the lifecycle of your networking software.
3. Use a common API - Expose all your data to the outside world using a JSON based API such that your software may interact with an unbounded number of external programs, thereby repeating the success of the UNIX operating systems.
4. No locality assumptions - It should not matter where an individual component of software is located. For example: an IS-IS Routing protocol instance may run on a bare-metal switch and the corresponding Border Gateway Protocol instance may run out of a data-center, yet the router is viewed as one coherent system. Where things are getting deployed is entirely a network operator choice.
5. Rapid Prototyping - Rather than waiting up until hardware packet forwarding is available, prototype new functionality using software based forwarding and model based networking. What matters if how fast new functionality gets into your integration and acceptance test labs.
6. Test driven development. One of the guiding principles of the DevOps movement is that the people who develop the network, also have to operate the network. Therefore its paramount prior to any roll-out to run unit- , integration- and acceptance- tests. Hence we share our test frame work for speeding up network delivery time.

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