Dr. Ricard Vilalta, Senior Researcher at CTTC, presented a new demonstration of a novel prototype for a cloud-native SDN Controller at IEEE NetSoft (29 June-3 July 2020). Due to COVID19, the conference was virtual, but this did not affect a huge number of participants and it also provided a high level of scientific discussions.
Current SDN controllers are monolithic applications that are run on dedicated servers and require specific protocols for synchronization among them. These SDN controllers do not provide the required flexibility to scale-out in case of a cloud-scale number of connectivity service requests. The demonstration presented the control of transport networks based on ONF Transport API using a cloud-native SDN controller based on micro-services. The demo provides insights on novel software implementations of transport network control technologies, such as container-based control architectures and standard interfaces. The proposed SDN controller components synchronize among them using gRPC protocol and a defined protocol buffer.