Intent Framework 2015 Roadmap

February Release

• New Intent Type: "Tunnels"

• Maybe use cases require these; will mitigate need for / make conflict resolution easier

• Intent Manager Performance

• Consider batching or asynchronous reads (as we already do for writes)

• Intent Statistics

  • Provide API to query statistics for a given intent (likely using the group id)

• Introduce explicit dependencies for Intents and batches (from implicit, app-based ones)
• Refactor interface with flow rule services (eliminate future polling)

• Investigation of IP-RAN and spring uses cases

• Intent Compilers / Installers

• Favor existing resources in the compilers when selecting paths

• Bi-directional path selection

• Implement replace mechanism for our intent installers to optimize flow rule updates

• Intent Recovery and Distributed Testing

  • There are a lot of edge cases that have not been adequately tested (including control plane and data plane failures)

• Resource Manager

• Introduce more types of resources (i.e. T-port and queues)

• Improve distributed implementation

• Objective Tracker Enhancements

• Listen and respond to devices and host events

• Listen and respond to flow rule events (requires use of group id in flow rule)

• Do a better job of failover (including pulling state and replaying missed events)

• Single point to multi-point intents

• Useful for broadcast or multicast

June-ish

• Conflict Detection

• Provide a way to detect and mitigate conflict between intents

• (it may be possible to roll this into the work on composition)

• Application and Intent-based composition

• Provide a mechanism to compose intents within and/or across application(s)

• (Hopefully in conjunction with Jennifer Rexford's group and Josh Reich from AT&T. This work should be started in early 2015.)

• Batch update scheduling

• Improved scheduling algorithms for decided batch order and increasing parallelism

• There are some papers that describe mechanisms for this.

• Security

• Require certains roles to provision various types of intents

• Packet layer constraints

• Mechanism for latency and bandwidth guarantees

• Other types of policy

• We currently support forwarding, but we can make the abstraction more general by providing: (point)+ to (point)+ intents.

• Introduce traffic (or other) policy, configuration, data collection

• Active (rather than passive) data collection is an interesting

December-ish

• Introduce a more generic/powerful language for expressing intents

• (like Frentic/Pyretic)

• Optimization/Reuses across intents

• We have talked for a long time now about reusing flow rules or tunnels across intents. This will help in reacting to network failures as well as conserving data plane resources.

• Global Optimization / Defragmentation

• "It works, now make it better."

• We don't consider recomputing/rerouting intents when better paths become available.

• Perhaps we can also leverage the group table

• Consistent updates / Update rounds

• When doing TE or other optimizations, care needs to be taken to ensure

• Virtual Resources

• Provide intents as resources to other applications

• Enable apps to use virtual resources that have been provisioned (through intents) by other apps

• Allow applications to impose policy on the intents of other applications