What is the relationship between East-West traffic and SDN?

What is the relationship between East-West traffic and SDN?

The relationship between East-West traffic in the data center and SDN is reflected in the fact that many SDN solutions are designed to address the challenges posed by such dynamic traffic. There is no shortage in the network industry to discuss the relationship between East-West traffic and SDN solutions.

To highlight this relationship in more detail, let's take a look at SDN's ability to simplify the implementation and management of East-West traffic network policies, dynamic multi-tenant, and separate the east-west traffic of each customer.

First, many data centers and cloud SDN solutions regard network virtualization as the future development direction. Although other network engineers may resist and turn the topic to a virtual LAN or Multi-Protocol Label exchange VPN (this is the way physical networks are divided over the years), there is a key difference, network Virtualization in SDN shows more advanced network abstraction, which can help simplify policy execution and management.

Suppose an organization needs to execute a policy on a subset of east/west traffic (for example, filtering traffic between two workloads or virtual machines ). Network implementation of this policy, packet filtering or rules must be manually configured on a variety of devices. If one of the workloads is quietly migrated to the network team, the required configuration may not be on the new device (the device where the packets enter the network ).

At the same time, as the policy changes, manual update package filtering for each basic device will also become a challenge. The SDN solution implements more advanced network abstraction so that these policies should be used in a centralized virtual network controller rather than a physical network. The resulting policies may be distributed separately and applied to the underlying physical network. This simplifies policy management and execution, because no matter where the workload is in the network, the policies on the Virtual Layer are executed.

Next, let's take a look at the multi-tenant data center when it is applied to East-West traffic. Imagine a user trying to add multiple workloads or instances (such as Web servers and database servers) in a multi-tenant cloud ). Users may want to separate their specific workloads and the thing traffic they produce from other users. There is no doubt that manual configuration of these types of services in a traditional network is an operational burden.

Configuring ports and VLANs on hundreds of switches requires a lot of work. Adding isolated layer-3 services or additional network functions such as server Load balancer further complicate this problem. Therefore, many SDN solutions provide high-level abstraction for multiple tenants, simplifying the deployment of required connections. More importantly, these SDN solutions regard the network as a whole, so that the required connections can be deployed or canceled in a centralized manner, rather than on each device.

All in all, when we emphasize the relationship between East-West traffic and SDN, we naturally cannot avoid these two examples. SDN has real solutions and applicability.