Incremental Processing with ovn-controller, with Han Zhou from eBay

OVS Orbit

Han Zhou is an architect working on highly scalable and reliable SDN solutions for eBay's cloud infrastructure. He is an active contributor in OpenStack and OVS/OVN. Before eBay, he has been working in networking area for more than 10 years in Cisco and Nokia.

In OVN, the ovn-controller daemon runs on each hypervisor. It obtains logical flows from the OVN southbound database, transforms them into "physical flows," and pushes the physical flows into ovs-vswitchd over an OpenFlow connection. In the current implementation, whenever any of the tables in the OVN southbound database changed, the daemon would fully recompute all of the physical flows to be pushed into ovs-vswitchd. With a sufficiently large setup, this is expensive. This talk is about Han's patches to make computation in ovn-controller incremental, so that a small change in the input causes only a small amount of computation.

Some of the talk is easier to follow if you view the slides (PDF).

Han was previously featured in OVS Orbit in episode 36, where he spoke about Baker, an approach used by eBay to combine OVN with Kubernetes.

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.