Managing your Network as a Distributed Application Cluster

6:30pm - Arrive (Food/Drink)
7pm-8pm - Presentation by Yan Filyurin (Bloomberg) and hopefully a demo too!
8:00-8:30 - Hang out and Chat about Network Automation

Abstract for the night's talk:

Numerous advances in orchestration tools, templating languages, and network management practices make it possible to easily automate various network tasks that involved configuration of many interfaces and devices

At the same time it created the luxury to maintain a lot of non-ephemeral configuration state on the devices that must be preserved and dependencies on central orchestration system to maintain that state. This can lead to configuration sprawl, scaling limitations of centralized systems.

This talk is an examination of some ideas that make it possible to deploy large network constructs in which most configuration is treated in the same fashion as the database of a typical control plane protocol and virtually no configuration is specific to a particular network device. The goal is not to eliminate automation, but to create a framework where the entire network construct is run no differently than any other distributed application cluster.