Date
Meeting Recording:
https://wiki.tungsten.io/download/attachments/10060441/20190618-MWG-positioning_call.mp4?api=v2
Attendees
Agenda
- Start the Recording (started!)
Minutes
- RLB with the background on TF
- Call to action that the project needs to move forward
- Still currently very much in Carrier Land
- Mostly carriers or hosting-type companies are leaning in
- Need to get out of the network-focused messaging around Contrail & TF
- Marketing messaging
- Make docs useful for non-network-engineers
- Make project easier to deploy with k8s
- Why Kubernetes matters
- Has effectively won the app platform world for the future
- Is standard, with a broad reach
- Accordingly, align well with CNCF and that ecosystem
- Get mentioned in the same breath as Calico
- Get more folks to recognize that TF is a good CNI for k8s
- swill: SDN space is in a bit of turmoil right now wrt the market
- Some projects are having a challenging time (ODL)
- Opportunity to establish leadership in the market
- Separate from k8s, but still worth mentioning & keeping in mind
- LC: So…appeal of SDN is dead? Or the concept? Or…?
- RLB: SDN is VMware messaging to network IT folks
- New market is now developers, so need to speak their language
- Focus on networking (L4-L7) with Istio (and other service mesh), Envoy, etc.
- Aren't thinking of networking/SDN terms
- Are thinking of k8s terms
- For instance: Tigera & Calico are messaging around security, not SDN
- swill: Are in a consumer market now; were in a delivery market for a long time
- Based on consumer demand, rather than what the provider wants to build
- Developers just want the features. Don't care how it's implemented.
- Want to consume functionality.
- In the past, esp around SDNs, service providers were in the tech & pushed it up the stack whether consumers wanted it or not
- Thinks TF has the capability to support both sides of this
- Carriers/telcos aren't going anywhere → Edge computing
- TF has bright future in this way
- Handles multi-cloud & interconnect between different services quite well
- One of only SDNs that handles service chaining in a coherent manner
- On other side, is a big gap between service providers and customers
- Offering infrastructure, but developers want to consume platform
- Service providers have to start delivering PaaS to attract workloads of developers → Kubernetes
- Don't need to market as much to service providers since they know about it a bit more
- But still opportunity there w/the SDN shakeup
- TF well-positioned to be the solution to their problems
- Carriers/telcos aren't going anywhere → Edge computing
- Key audiences
- Service providers (intentionally vague; many different sorts)
- To expose the functionality to be consumed
- Value prop to this audience revolves around their consumers
- Provide platform that's intuitive and easy to use from a platform perspective
- RLB: Carriers don't care quite as much about what the customers want
- Use TF as an internal tool to get operational leverage and scale
- Are quite comfortable with the direct sales model (Juniper stepping in and providing a networking solution)
- Support for open source model, but prefer commercially supported implementations
- swill: A lot of orgs are forced to adopt a service provider model even for their own IT
- Enterprise application developers on public clouds
- Using k8s as base substrate
- Consuming the services
- Not traditional on-prem enterprise IT (these are wrapped up in vmware)
- Go for the enterprise devs early in their app lifecycle
- Start using TF early on, easier to transition to IT
- Trojan horse play
- As soon as they adopt public clouds for enterprise apps, you step into mult-cloud land where TF plays very well
- Public clouds?
- No, they're not a target audience for us
- But recently they're starting to figure out that multi-cloud is a thing
- Have a sympathetic ear because of this, but not a target audience
- Service providers (intentionally vague; many different sorts)
- Hybrid cloud
- RLB: TF can drive security and policies even in public clouds
- Can be a good story here for basic multi-cloud across public clouds
- "Easy failover to GCP if there's an AWS outage…"
- Hard to do 2 deployments on 2 different clouds; TF abstracts this away and makes it easier
- swill: Example: geopolitically, hybrid cloud is becoming more critical in Canada
- Data Sovereignty can become a requirement, simply because data needs to live at home while services are hosted in public cloud
- TF has the ability and functionality to simplify this
- RLB: TF can drive security and policies even in public clouds
- Define "service provider" → swill
- Traditional: telcos
- New: a service being operated by a team other than that consuming it
- Internal-only
- Public
- Consumers care about consuming tech as a service, not running it
- Even if they run it, they'll consume it as a service
- Anyone who builds and runs a platform that delivers services
- Looking forward for vrouter
- There's talk of a next-gen vrouter, separate from TF
- RH, Juniper, Intel
- Ubiquitous networking mesh
- Would ship with the linux kernel, standard interface
- Could then select the SDN controller you want
- Comparing what TF is today against other things that the audiences are looking at. What does TF offer that the others don't?
- VMB: What even are the competitors here?
- In k8s ecosystem, it's all Calico (and commercial Tigera)
- Cilium
- ODL → not really a player as much in our audiences
- Canal (Flannel + Calico)
- DPDK/SmartNics (but in layman's terms; terms that the developers think they understand are totally cool) - marketing the outcome: packet performance acceleration
- What does TF do to solve the problems?
- Enable use of DPDK
- Move network work out of the kernel and into userspace
- Allows for much better perf
- A feature of DPDK but TF allows you to leverage it without changing your entire architecture
- swill believes that with the rise of edge computing then having some sort of network performance optionality will become table stakes
- Service Chaining
- TF handles better than most other options
- Will dig into this a lot more next time
- Multi-site connectivity is well handled
- Separate from multi-cloud hybrid
- Security
- Dig into more next time
- BGP
- Not everyone supports it and it's surprisingly useful
- Enable use of DPDK
- VMB: What even are the competitors here?
Action items
- Lisa CaywoodFor next time: dig into Service Chaining, Security, BGP