Converging Approaches to Software Switches

On Aug. 4 and 5, I attended APSys 2016, the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems. This episode is my own “industry talk” from APSys, titled “Converging Approaches in Software Switches: Combining code- and data-driven approaches to achieve a better result.” Slides from the talk are available and may provide a little extra insight, but it is not necessary to view them to follow along with with the talk. This talk introduces the idea that software switches can be broadly divided in terms of their architecture into two categories: “code-driven” switches that call a series of arbitrary functions on each packet, and “data-driven” switches that use a single engine to apply actions selected from a series of tables. This talk explains the two models and the usefulness of the categorization, and explain how hybrids of the two models can build on the strengths of both. In the past, people have asked me to compare Open vSwitch to other software switches, both architecture- and performance-wise. This talk is the closest that I plan to come to a direct comparison. In it, I cover a key architectural difference between Open vSwitch and most other software switches, and I explain why that architectural difference makes a difference for benchmarks that authors of many software switches like to tout. This talk includes a very kind introduction from Sorav Bansal, assistant professor at IIT-Delhi, as well as several questions and answers interleaved, including some from Sorav and some from others' whose names I did not catch. OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.