OpenDaylight is an open source project and open to all. Developers can contribute at the individual level just like any other open source project. This blog series highlights the people who are collaborating to create the future of SDN and NFV.
Gera Goft is Senior Architect in Radware's CTO Office with 23 years of diverse experience in the various aspects of distributed and clustered systems. He has been a central pillar in research, architecture, design and implementation of numerous industry changing technologies and products – where his passion lies.
How did you get involved with OpenDaylight? What is your background?
I dived into software-defined networking (SDN) last year, immediately recognizing its enormous potential to dramatically change the network, cloud and service provider landscape. At Radware, I have been leading the architecture and the development of Defense4All - a complete network application to detect denial of service attacks and drive their mitigation.
My rich experience in distributed computing and systems, clustering, high availability and scalability helps me see how network functions can be easily assigned to different network nodes, efficiently rebalanced and otherwise elegantly adjusted in response to rapid changes. For me, this is another exciting dimension of distributed computing.
What project are you working on for OpenDaylight? Any new developments to share?
The Defense4All project which I am leading is a network application on top of the OpenDaylight controller. To me, however, Defense4All is more than just a security network application. I envision it as a security applications container that can accommodate different attack detection mechanisms, different mitigation devices and methods and produce reports for various traffic learning and reporting systems. With Defense4All we aim to promote an ecosystem of security products, technologies and research from multiple vendors, research institutes and independent contributors.
Defense4All is at its beta stages but most of the functionality is already in place. It works nicely over the controller to set up counters in multiple locations for selected traffic, collect traffic statistics from those locations, and set up traffic forwarding flows to mitigation devices when attacks strike. We can see very fast counters setup, very fast reading of latest counter values and very fast traffic redirection. This means that network configurations in response to dynamic changes can be done within seconds or less, which is also very exciting.
People have different definitions for SDN depending on how they're using the network. What's your definition of SDN?
Without getting into definitions, to me SDN is first of all the closure of the gap between the servers and storage world and the networks world. While the former has advanced to virtualization and cloud computing in the previous decade, the latter was lagging behind. This is changing with the introduction of SDN, the network function virtualization drive, and the advanced overlay networks – all which allow to finally close that gap.
I am also passionate about the fact that with SDN a network application can easily see and feel the entire network and easily control it (via a single control point). This allows smarter reasoning and decisions to be made by the network application. This also allows the network application to easily and quickly apply such decisions in a distributed fashion across the entire network.
In the longer run I can see an ecosystem of network applications (network app mashups). For instance, how about a security network application that presents to users a network attacks status augmented with network load tracking view produced by another application?
From your perspective, what are the major benefits of making OpenDaylight an open source project?
I believe that making OpenDaylight an open source project allows faster and broader adoption of SDN. For researchers this means convenient ground to explore and experiment with novel concepts. For vendors this means ability to provide smarter and more efficient quality SDN-based solutions and products. For customers this means lower cost, higher ability solutions compared to pre-SDN technologies, with faster integration of innovative products and technologies and no vendor lock-in.
What does your workspace look like?
My work environment is fairly organized. I have a large board which I obviously like to use for architecture drawings, algorithms, exchange of ideas and even "to-dos".
When and how do you get your best coding done? At night listening to music? In the morning with a cup of coffee?
I can have a fairly long productive coding time-span, but find that in some cases extreme programming (jointly with another colleague) leads to higher quality code, faster. It also keeps me alert longer. Otherwise I usually work in a quiet environment, with no music, just periodic stretches…
Sent from my iPhone
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