This weblog is a collaboration with co-author Lukas Krattiger, Distinguished Technical Marketing Engineer
Innovation is considered one of many traits defining trade management. Becoming an trade chief requires an organization to innovate and discover new methods to resolve buyer issues. Industry management isn’t one thing that may be created in a single day. It takes greater than a software program launch or an inventory of supported options to cement your self as a know-how thought chief within the networking trade. Over the previous a number of a long time, Cisco has demonstrated its management in networking by main know-how improvements that meet and exceed prospects’ wants after which enabling the adoption of those applied sciences throughout organizations driving standardization. This has additionally led to strong collaborations and interoperability amongst completely different distributors for the good thing about the trade as a complete – please check with Figure 1 Number of RFCs authors per affiliation for the highest 30 firms at IETF over the previous three a long time.
Some examples of such applied sciences are L3VPN, MPLS, and EVPN. Cisco innovators similar to Eric Rosen, Yakov Rekhter, and George Swallow incubated MPLS and L3VPN applied sciences after which led the standardization effort on the IETF. Furthermore, Cisco innovator, Ali Sajassi incubated EVPN know-how after which led the standardization effort on the IETF. A well-adopted commonplace is sort of a crew sport, and it requires not solely participation but in addition contributions from each member of the crew – i.e., from each vendor and supplier concerned.
In the previous decade, Cisco has launched EVPN know-how to the networking trade at massive and has led the standardization efforts for all of the preliminary RFCs for this know-how with the assistance of a number of distributors and repair suppliers. Although there are distributors who’re true companions and contributors to this know-how and its standardization, there are “others” who’re neither members nor contributors however simply customers of it. One can simply discover out who’s who by trying on the IETF statistics for EVPN.
These “other” distributors have made claims to be pioneers of cloud networking materials driving a standards-based strategy, regardless that they’re brazenly adopting and implementing Cisco-authored RFCs and drafts into their software program. These “other” distributors try and create the notion of open requirements as their core pillar. Cisco has been a long-time innovator with a confirmed observe document of growing IETF drafts to facilitate the implementation of recent applied sciences which might be extensively adopted by these different distributors (“others”) within the networking trade. Being an trade chief requires Cisco to proceed evolving and driving requirements to make networks work higher – please check with Figure 2. Chart displaying the variety of EVPN RFC Primary Authorship, EVPN RFC Authorship, and Working-Group Authorship Affiliation:
IETF
For most of us, it’s extensively recognized the IETF is the premier Internet requirements group. Citing the IETF Standards web page:
“Improving existing standards and creating, implementing, and deploying new standards is an ongoing effort. The IETF’s mission is to produce high-quality, relevant technical documents that describe these voluntary standards. IETF working groups are the primary mechanism for the development of IETF specifications and guidelines.”
As EVPN-VXLAN turns into the de facto commonplace for IP materials, Cisco continues to boost and publish IETF drafts primarily based on the protocols and architectures addressing new necessities and use circumstances. When Cisco develops the requirements and drafts, there may be an implementation in thoughts for the system and its elements, whereas “others” will select to comply with and implement the RFCs and the drafts and not using a full understanding of the use circumstances.
These different distributors will create and leverage function matrices to fill their gaps and reply to RFPs, citing our paperwork and performing as if they might know higher. Cisco can confidently declare to guide whereas “others” solely comply with, whereas Cisco invents and “others” solely undertake.
Cisco continues to increase its management in selling open requirements, interoperability, and multi-vendor options for Cloud Networking applied sciences.
This collection of blogs aimed to supply a deeper understanding of EVPN VXLAN and additions to the IETF drafts carried out for in the present day’s buyer deployments.
History of Ethernet VPN (EVPN)
For a few years, the necessity for extending Layer-2 effectively was a burdensome activity. Before the supply of Layer-2 VPNs, kinds of LANE (LAN Emulation) have been used to move Ethernet throughout distances, or we simply plugged two Ethernet domains collectively by way of CWDM or DWDM. All these approaches had their professionals and cons, however some widespread challenges remained, the virtualization of the Layer-2 service throughout a typical infrastructure. When MPLS-based Layer-2 VPN rose to prominence, the presence of true Layer-2 VPNs turned obtainable, and with this the higher use of the underlying transport infrastructure. With VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service) multipoint-to-multipoint Layer-2 VPNs turned inexpensive and addressed many new use circumstances. Even although VPLS introduced many benefits, the pseudo-wire upkeep, transport dependency, and lack of complete embedded entry node redundancy nonetheless made it difficult to deploy. While all of this was the reality over a decade in the past, round 2012 we launched into a brand new chapter of Layer-2 VPNs with the arrival of Ethernet VPN briefly EVPN. In its essence, EVPN addressed the challenges the extra conventional L2VPNs incurred and innovated new schemes in layer-2 tackle studying to develop into some of the profitable VPN applied sciences.
The journey of EVPN as a regular began again in 2010 when Ali Sajassi launched and offered the very first draft of EVPN (initially referred to as Routed VPLS, draft-sajassi-l2vpn-rvpls-bgp-00.txt, to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in March of 2010. This draft was later merged with one other draft by Rahul Aggarwal (from Juniper), draft-raggarwa-mac-vpn-00.txt, due to their synergy, and a brand new draft was born in October 2010 – draft-raggarwa-sajassi-l2vpn-evpn-00.txt. This draft turned a working group doc in February 2012 and have become a regular RFC 7432 in February 2015. This is the defacto base RFC for the fundamental EVPN conduct and its modes and subsequent EVPN RFC builds on high of the groundwork of this RFC.
Around the identical time as the principle EVPN draft introduction, Cisco launched different EVPN associated drafts similar to draft-sajassi-raggarwa-l2vpn-evpn-req-00.txt and draft-sajassi-l2vpn-pbb-evpn-00.txt in October 2010 and March 2011 respectively which turned commonplace in February 2014 and September 2015 respectively.
After the publications of preliminary EVPN drafts that later turned RFCs 7432, 7209, and 7623, in 2013, Cisco printed one other set of EVPN drafts for Virtualization/VxLAN and for inter-subnet forwarding (L2 and L3 forwarding) that gave EVPN its versatility because it stands in the present day. These drafts later turned the usual RFCs 8365 and 9135.
With the primarily based EVPN utilizing MPLS encapsulation celebrated its success within the Service Provider market, for the Data Center an IP-based encapsulation was extra appropriate. With this, in 2013 the EVPN draft for “overlays” (draft-sd-l2vpn-evpn-overlay) was printed, which included the encapsulation of VXLAN and have become RFC 8365 in 2018. In order to deal with the assorted use circumstances for the Data Center, a few associated drafts have been filed across the similar time. The definition of find out how to do inter-subnet routing (draft-sajassi-l2vpn-evpn-inter-subnet-forwarding), how we promote a IP Prefix route in EVPN (draft-rabadan-l2vpn-evpn-prefix-advertisement) or find out how to interconnect a number of EVPN “overlay” domains with a Data Center Interconnect (draft-rabadan-l2vpn-dci-evpn-overlay). All these drafts from 2013 now being RFCs and outline the usual in how EVPN is getting used inside and between Data Centers.
The realms of requirements are sometimes a cabala. Opening this up and sharing among the histories with probably the most vital milestones is as vital as defining the requirements themselves. For greater than a decade, Cisco has actively pushed the standardization of EVPN and shared this innovation with the networking trade. With over 50 publications to the IETF, Cisco leads the EVPN standardization and is happy with the collaboration with its partnering authors. With the proliferation of EVPN throughout all of Cisco’s Operating Systems (IOS-XE, IOS-XR, NX-OS) being absolutely interoperable, the flexibleness of the best operational mannequin throughout deployments in Campus, WAN, Data Center, or Service Provider domains is unmatched.
Summary
Ethernet VPN or EVPN has a protracted historical past within the trade, celebrating 10 years of transport and deployment in varied Cisco community working techniques (NOS) surpassing the lifetime of many networking firms.
There is a way of pleasure to see how an concept thrives and turns into a mainstream community know-how with a large buyer and networking vendor adoption. While there may be all the time the choice to maintain all to your self, we consider locally and offering requirements for higher networking.
Learn extra about Cisco information heart and cloud networking applied sciences
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