North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Converged Networks Threat (Was: Level3 Outage)

  • From: Petri Helenius
  • Date: Wed Feb 25 14:45:55 2004 
David Meyer wrote:

No doubt. However, the problem is: What constitutes
"unnecessary system complexity"? A designed system's
robustness comes in part from its complexity. So its not
that complexity is inherently bad; rather, it is just
that you wind up with extreme sensitivity to outlying
events which is exhibited by catastrophic cascading
failures if you push a system's complexity past some
point; these are the so-called "robust yet fragile"
systems (think NE power outage).
I think you hit the nail on the head. I view complexity as diminishing returns play. When you increase complexity, the increase does benefit a decreasing percentage of the users. A way to manage complexity is splitting large systems into smaller pieces and try to make the pieces independent enough to survive a failure of neighboring piece. This approach exists at least in the marketing materials of many telecommunications equipment vendors. The question then becomes, "what good is a backbone router without BGP process". So far I haven�t seen a router with a disposable entity on interface or peer basis. So if a BGP speaker to 10.1.1.1 crashes the system would still be able to maintain relationship to 10.2.2.2. Obviously the point of single device availability becomes moot if we can figure out a way to route/switch around the failed device quickly enough. Today we don�t even have a generic IP layer liveness protocol so by default packets will be blackholed for a definite duration until a routing protocol starts to miss it�s hello packets. (I�m aware of work towards this goal)

In summary, I feel systems should be designed to run independent in all failure modes. If you lose 1-n neighbors the system should be self-sufficient on figuring out near-immediately the situation, continue working while negotiating with neighbors about the overall picture.

Pete