Software product engineering
SDN & NFV
Building high-performance, resilient and automated networks
Our experience in a nutshell
CodiLime has battle-proven expertise in building and integrating SDN & NFV solutions using both open-source and proprietary software for networking software and data center providers. We help build products and deploy them in the client’s production environment.
Tungsten Fabric
Open vSwitch
ONOS
Custom SD-WAN
How we help
Software Engineering
- Design or enhance an architecture for a system or an integrated solution with proof-of-concept (PoC) validation
- Design and deliver a novel solution that spans different layers: software, networking and hardware
- Design and deliver a graphical user interface
- Plan and execute a system or component’s migration to a cloud
- Deliver a custom-tailored orchestration solution
- Help improve non-functional system characteristics (performance, backups, monitoring, security, scalability, recoverability, reliability)
- Design and implement a quality assurance plan/testing plan including performance, scalability, stress tests, functionality and new features
- Create or enhance an automated CI/CD solution for SDN/NFV solution-specific needs
- Migrate a solution to be compatible with Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC) paradigm
- Integrate an existing SD-WAN solution with the client’s system via API—for either the software solution or the hardware integration
Integrations
- Orchestrators or virtualization platforms (OpenShift and OpenStack)
- Private clouds
- Public clouds or hybrid, multi-cloud solutions
- Kubernetes platform (such as integration via Operator Framework)
- SmartNIC devices
- SR-IOV clusters
- Operating systems (such as Linux, Windows Server)
- Networking devices via network APIs (YANG/Netconf) or operating system drivers and user-space solutions (such as DPDK)
- Other third-party solutions
Professional services
- Network design (both HLD and LLD)
- Lab and production deployments
- Audit and optimization of existing deployments
- Migration to new solutions
- Introduction of new services and integration with existing systems
- Day0 to Day2 operations automation
- Creation of CI/CD pipelines for complete staging, pre-prod and prod deployments
Tungsten Fabric
Tungsten Fabric (previously OpenContrail) is an open-source SDN Controller that provides connectivity and security for virtual, containerized or bare-metal workloads.
One of TF’s main strengths is its ability to connect both the physical and virtual worlds. In other words, to combine different workloads in one network regardless of their nature. They can be virtual machines, physical servers or containers.
The technology stack TF can connect includes:
- Orchestrators or virtualization platforms (e.g. OpenStack, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Mesos or VMware vSphere/Orchestrator)
- SmartNICs and SR-IOV devices
- Public clouds (multi-cloud or hybrid solutions)
- Third-party proprietary solutions
CodiLime is one of the main contributors to Tungsten Fabric’s development—we’ve been working with Tungsten Fabric/OpenContrail since its inception in 2013.
Open vSwitch
Open vSwitch (OVS) is an open-source multilayer virtual switch, designed to enable effective programmatic network automation while supporting standard management interfaces and protocols including NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, and 802.1ag.
Open vSwitch can be used both as a software-based network switch running within a virtual machine hypervisor and as the control stack for dedicated switching hardware. Thanks to its flexibility, it has been used in multiple virtualization platforms, switching chipsets, and networking hardware accelerators.
OVS has also been integrated with various cloud computing software platforms and virtualization management systems, for example OpenStack.
OVS can act as a datplane within an SDN architecture. It is also one of the most popular implementations of OpenFlow, a communication protocol allowing remote access to the forwarding plane of a network switch or a router.
ONOS
ONOS (Open Network Operating System) is an open-source SDN Controller developed under the umbrella of ONF (The Open Networking Foundation). It enables fine-grained control of network traffic passing through the underlying dataplane, which can consist of both hardware and virtual components.
A fully heterogeneous environment can be managed with the extensive library of protocols and adapters in the southbound layer that ONOS platform offers out-of-the-box.
At the same time, creating new apps and network services within ONOS is relatively easy thanks to the ability to consume features exposed by ONOS core subsystems (they offer a range of aggregated inventories and views of network topology and objects).
ONOS’ benefits include:
- Modularity—control-plane apps can be added and the southbound layer can be extended
- Scalability—control plane capacity can be scaled up, and new instances are added when more control plane capacity is needed
- An extensive southbound layer library: OpenFlow, P4Runtime, NETCONF, gNMI, gNOI, TL1, SNMP, XMPP, OVSDB, to name a few
- Northbound abstractions—creation, deployment and operation of configuration, management and control applications are simplified
- Innovation—support for emerging technologies, protocols and network concepts
- Versatility—support for various types of network workloads (including for telco, datacenter and enterprise use-cases)
- Cost reduction—support of multiple use-cases based on white box merchant silicon hardware
Custom SD-WAN
A Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is the implementation of SDN into WAN topology.
The SDN approach to networking consists in separating the control plane from the data plane. The idea is to use a centralized logical brain (control plane) to control multiple devices (dataplane) deployed across a network or its particular domain.
SD-WAN architecture, on the other hand, allows enterprises to use different uplinks (MPLS, LTE, fixed broadband etc.) across different branch offices. A centralized control plane allows administrators to configure policies that are then automatically applied to all sites. Additionally, administrators can configure more advanced algorithms to manage network traffic.
Building a custom SD-WAN solution can bring considerable business advantages:
- Reduced costs
- Increased application performance
- More intelligent traffic forwarding across the WAN
- Faster deployment
- Improved security