Don't mind the gap: Bridging network-wide objectives and device-level configurations

Ryan Beckett, Ratul Mahajan, Todd Millstein, Jitendra Padhye, David Walker

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

113 Scopus citations

Abstract

We develop Propane, a language and compiler to help network operators with a challenging, error-prone task - bridging the gap between network-wide routing objectives and low-level configurations of devices that run complex, distributed protocols. The language allows operators to specify their objectives naturally, using high-level constraints on both the shape and relative preference of traffic paths. The compiler automatically translates these specifications to router-level BGP configurations, using an effective intermediate representation that compactly encodes the flow of routing information along policy-compliant paths. It guarantees that the compiled configurations correctly implement the specified policy under all possible combinations of failures. We show that Propane can effectively express the policies of datacenter and backbone networks of a large cloud provider; and despite its strong guarantees, our compiler scales to networks with hundreds or thousands of routers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages328-341
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450341936
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 22 2016
Event2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016 - Florianopolis, Brazil
Duration: Aug 22 2016Aug 26 2016

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Other

Other2016 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2016
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityFlorianopolis
Period8/22/168/26/16

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Communication
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Signal Processing

Keywords

  • BGP
  • Compilation
  • Distributed systems
  • Domain-specific language
  • Fault tolerance
  • Propane
  • Synthesis

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