John Leung, Vice President of Alliances, DMTF Inc.
The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards organization has hosted academic workshop on manageability for several years. These workshops were conceived to recognize and illuminate research in system, virtualization, and distributed management. At the time, one of the DMTF's key technologies, the Common Information Model (CIM), had brought forth an abundant inventory of open source tools and implementations, which researchers could select, modify and extend for their own needs. Recently, the DMTF has released Redfish™, a modern RESTful interface, for managing compute, storage and network platforms and services. The simplicity and familiar tool-chain of Redfish has driven its acceptance by the manageability ecosystem. The presentation will provide a brief overview of DMTF and its technologies, before focusing on the Redfish and the open source tools available which researchers can use to extend the interface in exploring new areas of network and service management.

Large scale content and cloud infrastructure providers strive to offer the highest level of availability across the infrastructure stack. This however is not an easy feat given the fast pace of technology evolution, infrastructure expansion and global reach. Google's network infrastructure has been built to achieve scale, efficiency and very high reliability by following a set of key architectural principles, which we refer to as the "zero touch network". Failures do happen in any global scale network infrastructure such as Google's. By analyzing past failures, we found that a large number of them happened when a network management operation was in progress. To minimize such failures, we have built a network infrastructure where all network operations are automated, requiring no additional steps beyond the instantiation of intent. The network infrastructure is fully declarative and changes applied to individual network elements are derived by the network infrastructure from the high-level network-wide intent. Any network changes are automatically halted and automatically rolled-back by the management infrastructure if the network displays unintended behavior. Finally, the infrastructure does not allow operations which violate network policies. While it might be tempting to limit the rate at which the network evolves to minimize risk of network failures, we have internally come to the opposite conclusion. In a zero-touch-network, continuous incremental evolution results in a more robust infrastructure rather than in-frequent large changes.

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne (Levi Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University, USA)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is not all that interesting at small scale - a home thermostat consisting of a microprocessor connecting to BlueTooth or WiFi hardly requires technological breakthroughs in computer science and networking. However, the challenges become more interesting as IoT scales up to include smart phones, scales down to long-lived devices that may be energy-constrained and scales out to tens of thousands of nodes, e.g., when instrumenting a large commercial building. For scaling up, we need to consider smartphones and similar devices as integral components of sensor-based systems, including the impact on privacy. For scaling down, energy-efficient wide-area coverage may offer new opportunities. For scaling up, securing, managing and prototyping large numbers of nodes exposes the weak points in our existing IP-based infrastructure. For example, classical techniques for managing credentials and access rights are unlikely to work well, so we have worked on inverting the standard model for device authentication. Diagnosing network conditions has to move beyond expert guidance as many of these networks are going to be managed by mechanical engineers and HVAC technicians, not system administrators writing Perl scripts querying SNMP counters. As an example, I will discuss our WiSlow diagnostic system. Scaling up also requires the ability to plan, simulate and emulate deployments before a building has been completed, motivating our current work on SECE (Sense Everything Control Everything). Finally, computation will likely move between many more locations, from the IoT device itself to opportunistically-available computational resources to traditional cloud infrastructure.

Larry Peterson (Chief Architect and Board Member, ON.LAB, USA)
CORD is a new design of a Telco Central Office that replaces closed and proprietary hardware with software running on commodity servers, switches, and access devices. It allows network operators to benefit from both the economies of scale (infrastructure constructed from a few commodity building blocks) and agility (the ability to rapidly deploy and elastically scale services) that commodity cloud providers enjoy today. This talk outlines the motivation for CORD, introduces its architecture, and describes an open reference implementation of that is available for evaluation.