Keynote: Scaling the S in SDN – Albert Greenberg, Director Azure Networking and Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft
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In the past several years, the cloud network was transformed and rebuilt in software using SDN – Microsoft Azure has been built on these technologies, enabling greater flexibility and programmability than ever before. Our focus today is on scale, density, and utilization of the programmable network, pushing our infrastructure to meet the demands of today’s massive cloud environments with millions of servers, and new cloud-based workloads.
We introduce the Virtual Filtering Platform, Azure’s programmable dataplane, in which we’ve scaled up the match action table model to support modern high density servers with more than 40Gbps of bandwidth, while providing the programmability for our many controllers and SDN applications to create new virtual networking functions. We are announcing that VFP, which has been key to scaling our infrastructure, will be made available to the public with Windows Server 2016 to support high density private cloud environments using Azure Stack on premises.
As an example of how new workloads push us to scale further, much of the industry is moving to containerized workloads and microservice architectures. To support this, we have built native integration to extend Azure virtual networking features directly to containers, across Linux and Windows, using our flexible SDN stack. We announce and demo several of these new networking features, as part of the Azure Container Service, allowing customers to deploy and manage containers using several popular open source container orchestrators.
