Dutt - Cloud Native Data Center Networking

by Dinesh G. Dutt

Copyright 2020 Dinesh G. Dutt. All rights reserved.

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978-1-492-04560-1

[LSI]

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

Cloud native data center networking. Thats quite a mouthful to chew if youre a reader. Or to bite off if youre the writer. Lets unpack the easy pieces first.

This is a book about building a robust, scalable network infrastructure for data centers. So if youre a network architect or network operator looking to understand, build, or validate your thinking about data centers, this book is for you. If youre a data center operator responsible for not just the network, but also compute and storage, and youre looking to get up to speed on the current thinking in network design of data centers, this book is for you. And if youre a network developer looking to find information thats scattered or is oral knowledge only, this book is for you.

More precisely, this book is about the design of a specific kind of data center network, the cloud native kind. If you search online for cloud native, youll find that its typically associated with a specific kind of application designmicroservicesand on a specific operating systemLinuxand that it relies on a lot of open source code. But those are means. The ends are about building robust, agile, scalable applications that allow the business to keep pace in a fast-moving world. When applied to networks, it means building a network that matches the applications and business needs in a way that is robust, flexible, scalable, and efficient to operate.

I picked the term cloud native to focus on the same ends in creating a network. You might not be building a network that scales to the the size of Amazon or Google, but I assume that you want to build a network that has these characteristics: affordable, high capacity, easy to manage, agile, and reliable. Thats a lot of adjectives, but I hope to touch upon all of these areas before were done.

And this book is not just for people deploying microservices-based applications. As hip as that is along with Kubernetes, building a reliable and predictable network is something everybody aspires to, whether youre doing containers or virtual machines or using bare-metal servers.

I do not pursue or want to push any vendors agenda, whether or not I worked for them in the past. If you see examples or text that reflects a vendor, it is only because of my familiarity with the vendor or tool rather than an endorsement. Biases always creep in, and Im willing to be called out so that I can correct them. That said, Ill readily admit up front that Im an advocate of open source tools, because I believe we can build better systems that way.