Project logistics
- Mentor: Bob Melander email: bmelande at cisco dot com; Sridar Kandaswamy email: skandasw at cisco dot com; Dipa Thakkar email: dthakkar at cisco dot com
- Min-max team size: 3-5
- Expected project hours per week (per team member): 6-8
- Will the project be open source? Yes
Preferred past experience
- OpenStack (Valuable)
- Networking coursework (Valuable)
- Automated testing (Valuable)
- Python (Nice to have)
Project Overview:
Background:
Software based networking infrastructure is a major component of cloud infrastructure along with cloud compute and storage infrastructure.
Some cloud networking use cases/workloads such as cryptography, deep packet inspection (DPI) and delay sensitive traffic transmission (such as video and financial data) require high performance networking. Intuitively, hardware based networking engines seem better suited to solve these use cases. Gathering quantitative data on software and hardware networking performance in these use cases will provide valuable insight on solutions. Tradeoffs of flexibility, cost and performance will be reviewed and documented. Based on this analysis, scheduling algorithms can be developed to use software or hardware based networking solutions for specific workloads/use cases.
Project Specifics:
OpenStack provides cloud based networking services (layer 3 networking services includes NAT, static routing etc.). Some OpenStack use cases require highly performant networking services. Therefore Cisco and other vendors have provided OpenStack plugin support (i.e., OpenStack extensions) to offload networking services to specialized networking hardware. There is little independent data analyzing and comparing the performance of the reference OpenStack networking implementation versus these networking plugins. In this project you will test and compare the reference OpenStack solution with the Cisco plugin solution. By analyzing the results you will create a set of recommendations for workloads that require specialized processing support and may implement a scheduler to implement these recommendations.
Short project intro video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPMrOnTrF0g
Cisco Cloud CTO, Lew Tucker cloud computing overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olnLpuUDZv8
Cisco OpenStack Router Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtCRx8F52kc
Some Technologies you will learn/use:
- OpenStack/OpenStack Neutron/OpenStack Neutron Cisco ASR1000 Plugin:
- You will learn to deploy and use OpenStack, the industry leading open source cloud infrastructure.
- You will learn how to deploy and use OpenStack’s networking service, entitled Neutron.
- You will learn how to deploy and use the OpenStack Neutron Cisco ASR1000 Plugin, an OpenStack extension for use with the Cisco ASR1000 Router.
- Python: OpenStack is written in Python and you may also learn how to extend OpenStack to better handle networking intensive workloads.
- iPerf: You will learn to use iPerf and/or other tools to perform network traffic testing.