P4 has gained industry momentum in the last year. New language features allow describing more forwarding devices, not only programmable ones but also fixed-function conventional ones. P4Runtime was introduced and quickly affirmed itself as the next-gen SDN open control plane API, capable of delivering switch silicon independence for cloud operators and service providers. In this tutorial, we provide a technical overview of P4 and the soon-to-be-released P4Runtime v1.0 specification. We also describe how P4 and P4Runtime are supported in ONOS, and the use cases they enable for service providers, including a switch silicon-independent NFV-enabled leaf-spine fabric for edge and access services, and the possibility to offload VNFs from the servers to the switches, such as the mobile 5G user plane and the BNG for residential access, maximizing performance, and with significant cost benefits.
I'm a Member of Technical Staff at Open Networking Foundation (ONF) where I'm currently leading the technical activities around the adoption of programmable data planes, P4, and P4Runtime in ONF projects such as ONOS and CORD. This is a community-driven effort part of the P... Read More →
