The TNC 21 virtual conference took place from June 21-25, 2021. TNC is co-funded by the European Union via the GÉANT (GN4-3) Project and Jisc, the UK’s national research and education network. TNC brings together decision-makers, networking, and collaboration specialists, plus identity and access management experts from all European NRENs, universities, worldwide sister institutions, as well as industry representatives.

The conference theme was “Making Waves”: Waves can build up and break down shorelines, their impact is transformative and powerful.  Similarly, digital technologies impact Research & Education with their transformative and disruptive capabilities. NRENs across the globe connect the teams delivering discoveries that impact and improve our lives via some of the fastest data networks, the most trusted identity services, and collaboration initiatives. NRENs inspire, disrupt, make waves and enable progress.

The AmLight team presented the results from two research projects.

Experiences in designing and operating an automated CI/CD pipeline for AmLight SDN orchestrator  

Abstract: The increasing adoption of highly programmable networking infrastructure requires a trustful and agile deployment of software packages in the Control Plane layer. In the era of software-defined infrastructure/networking, it comes to a point where the network engineering team takes the lead in the software deployment process. In this talk, we will share our experiences as network engineers designing and operating an automated pipeline to continuously integrate and deliver (CI/CD) software packages for our control layer. The CI/CD pipeline enables our SDN orchestrator to manage the programmable network infrastructure in a more secure and flexible manner. We will start by presenting the key motivations using real examples. We will then show some of the standard management APIs and frameworks that helped us build the CI/CD pipeline, and finally, our actual pipeline design and implementation, including some testing procedures to evaluate end-to-end connectivity in SDN environments. 

Speaker: Italo Valcy Da Silva Brito (FIU/AmLight) 

  

AmLight-INT: Lessons Learned after two years playing with In-band Network Telemetry 

Abstract: This presentation is a follow-up to the TNC19 presentation “AmLight-INT: In-band Network Telemetry to support big data applications”. Our goal is to present the current status of the AmLight-INT project, INT applications developed, and how INT is being used to support science workflows. Network troubleshooting and monitoring are essential in the network management routine. A novel approach, In-band Network Telemetry (INT), allows monitoring directly on the data plane. 

Speakers:
Arturo Quintana (FIU/AmLight)
Jeronimo Bezerra (FIU/AmLight)