Open standards such as OpenFlow and P4 promised to improve the landscape by opening access to these devices via a programmable API, but they still require someone to write a controller to re-implement normal switch functionality, such as forwarding and routing, in a multi-vendor, standards-compliant way. This led our group to write the Faucet software-defined network (SDN) controller, which allows anyone to fully realize the dream of programmable networks.
Faucet is a compact, open source OpenFlow controller that enables users to run their networks the same way they run server clusters. Faucet makes networking approachable to all by bringing the DevOps workflow to networking. It does this by making network functions (like routing protocols, neighbor discovery, and switching algorithms) easy to manage, test, and extend by moving them to regular software that runs on a server, versus the traditional approach of embedding these functions in the firmware of a switch or router. Faucet works by ingesting a YAML configuration file that represents the network topology and required network functionality, and it does the work to program every device on the network with OpenFlow.
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