Towards Production Deployment of a SDX Control Framework

Developing a distributed controller system for pro-duction software defined networks (SDN) requires substantial en-gineering effort to satisfy the stringent performance, adaptability, availability and security requirements that are well beyond the basic function development. The softwarization nature of SDN provides the opportunity to leverage the recent advancements in software engineering and system automation. In this paper we present our recent work to develop and deploy a wide-area SDN control framework prototype towards production deployment and operation. We primarily focus on three critical areas (1) enhancement of the software functions and the substrate virtualization configurations to fully support advanced connection services and fault tolerance in both data plane and control plane (2) a high-fidelity testing pipeline con-sisting of unit tests emulation and a testbed and (3) a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Our experience proved that the presented environment and process greatly increased the software quality and development efficiency which would ultimately lead to a reliable and continuous deploy-ment and automation of the targeted production SDN network.