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Chris Cummings

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Chris Cummings
Software Engineer

Presentation/Talks

Marc Koerner, Chris Cummings, Network Orchestration at ESnet, Cisco Automation Developer Days, December 4, 2023,

ESnet is the DOE’s internal research network WAN provider. The ESnet network is designed as a high bandwidth and jumbo-frame optimized network, capable of transporting vast amounts of data between US national laboratories and supercomputing facilities. Thus, ESnet is delivering end-to-end connectivity for the scientific community for all sorts of data analytics and simulations. One of the major goals for our latest network generation (ESnet6) was the objective to have a fully orchestrated and automated configuration management system. Therefore, ESnet is leveraging tools like the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) to deploy router configuration in a centralized and also service oriented fashion. This talk will provide an overview and insights about the current state of our NSO services, as well as how NSO is getting utilized in our network orchestration stack.

Chris Cummings, Benefits of IPv6 For Software Development, 2023 UK IPv6 Council Annual Meeting, November 21, 2023,

Chris Cummings, Dan Kelcher, Jeff Kala, Challenges to Network Automation Adoption, AutoCon0, November 13, 2023,

Network Orchestration is a defining factor in next generation networks, enabling operators to deliver more consistent and reliable services. Using the collaboratively developed Workflow Orchestrator and other commercial and open source tools, ESnet has been able to successfully Orchestrate and Automate network configuration deployment for large swaths of the ESnet6 network. This approach has enabled rapid deployment of new network services, as well as ensuring that configuration standards are well enforced when deploying network services. During this talk, we will provide a brief history of automation at ESnet, Introduce The Workflow Orchestrator, dive into what our goals were for orchestration and automation in the ESnet6 project, describe the technology and process that we used to meet those goals, and then provide a live demonstration of ESnet’s orchestration tooling in action. Finally, we will discuss the lessons we learned along the way while developing this tooling, providing time for Q&A.

Chris Cummings, Ryan Vredenburg, From Zero to Orchestrated Workshop, TechEX23, September 22, 2023,

Getting started with Network Orchestration is a daunting task that requires a lot of forethought and domain knowledge. Join this interactive full-day technical workshop to benefit from ESnet and SURF network and software engineers who have already gone through this process and are ready to share their knowledge.

A development environment will be provided, you just need to bring a laptop with a working docker setup and an IDE (preferably PyCharm or VSCode). The workshop will begin with introductions to product and workflow modeling with the Workflow Orchestrator and then move to interactive development sessions, finally ending with an open discussion around tailoring the orchestrator to your use-cases.

Chris Cummings, Intro to The Workflow Orchestrator, TechEX23, September 19, 2023,

Network Orchestration is a defining factor in next generation networks, enabling operators to deliver more consistent and reliable services. Using the collaboratively developed Workflow Orchestrator and other commercial and open source tools, ESnet has been able to successfully Orchestrate and Automate network configuration deployment for large swaths of the ESnet6 network. This approach has enabled rapid deployment of new network services, as well as ensuring that configuration standards are well enforced when deploying network services.

During this talk, we will provide a brief history of automation at ESnet, Introduce The Workflow Orchestrator, dive into what our goals were for orchestration and automation in the ESnet6 project, describe the technology and process that we used to meet those goals, and then provide a live demonstration of ESnet’s orchestration tooling in action. Finally, we will discuss the lessons we learned along the way while developing this tooling, providing time for Q&A.

Chris Cummings, Sean Cummings, DPDK as an Offload Engine for P4 SmartNIC Applications, DPDK Summit 2023, September 12, 2023,

P4 has taken off as a powerful language for high-performance network applications, however, it is a limited language by design. Due to these limits, many P4 applications require a “slow” path for more complex packet manipulation. In this presentation we explore the use of DPDK as a component of P4 applications in conjunction with the ESnet SmartNIC platform. Drawing from our experience building a P4-based SIIT-DC NAT64 translator on FPGAs, this presentation explores how DPDK can be leveraged to offload complex and variable-length packet manipulation functions from the P4 datapath to a general-purpose CPU. While P4 offers the tools to quickly develop Legacy IP to IPv6 translations that perform at 100Gbps line rates, we encountered challenges when dealing with complex packet translations like ICMP responses. Accordingly, we punt those more intricate, but less frequently used, translations to a DPDK side-car application. Join us as we delve into the architecture of our NAT64 translation application and demonstrate the development flow used for integrating these tools together.

Chris Cummings, Simone Spinelli, Planning and Development in R&E Networks: Automation and Orchestration, TNC23, June 9, 2023,

Side meeting at TNC to provide updates and discuss potential collaboration opportunities in intercontinental connectivity between R&E networks and automation/orchestration.

Chris Cummings, Hans Trompert, Peter Boers, Nehemya McCarter-Ribakoff, From Zero to Orchestrated—A Workflow Orchestrator Workshop, TNC23, June 5, 2023,

Getting started with Network Orchestration is a daunting task that requires a lot of forethought and domain knowledge. Join this interactive full-day technical workshop to benefit from ESnet and SURF network and software engineers who have already gone through this process and are ready to share their knowledge. A remote development environment will be provided, you just need to bring a laptop with an SSH client and an IDE (preferably PyCharm or VSCode). The workshop will begin with introductions to product and workflow modeling with The Orchestrator and then move to interactive development sessions, finally ending with an open discussion around tailoring the orchestrator to your use-cases.

Chris Cummings, A Real-World Approach to Intent-based Networking and Service Orchestration, CHINOG 10, October 6, 2022,

Chris Cummings, Garrett Stewart, Robert Kwon, Karl Newell, Network Orchestration and Automation at Internet2, CENIC, and ESnet, CENIC 22, September 28, 2022,

Join leaders from Internet2, ESnet, and CENIC as they discuss network orchestration. Network orchestration is a defining factor in next-generation networks, enabling operators to deliver more consistent and reliable services. ESnet has leveraged a combination of internally developed tools, open-source software, and commercial software to orchestrate and automate network configuration deployment. This approach has enabled rapid deployment of new network services and ensured that configuration standards are well enforced when deploying network services. Karl Newell will describe Internet2's work in this area, including their work with Cisco NSO, the deployment of 400G networks, and the platforms they are actively using. Robert Kwon will detail the efforts CENIC has underway. During this talk, panelists will provide a brief history of automation in their organizations, describe their goals for orchestration and automation, describe the technology and process used to meet those goals, and provide demonstrations of their orchestration tooling.

Chris Cummings, A Real-World Approach to Intent-Based Networking and Service Orchestration, NFD Service Provider 2, August 4, 2022,

Intent-based networking is something that has a lot of mystique and buzz-words surrounding it. This talk explores the approach that ESnet took to build our service orchestration software suite as well as giving a few demonstrations of the software in action. This presentation is not an exhaustive explanation of how to build your own intent-based networking environment, but rather an example and overview of a real-world stack that is being used in a production network today and the principles behind it.

Building software that controls network equipment has many similarities to traditional software engineering, however, testing this software introduces many complexities unique to the network orchestration world. Join this talk to learn how we approached these challenges by building a Realistic Orchestration Validation Environment for netwoRks (ROVER) at ESnet.

Others

Nick Buraglio, Chris Cummings, Russ White, Unintended Operational Issues With ULA, Internet Engineering Task Force Document, October 20, 2023,

The behavior of ULA addressing as defined by [RFC6724] is preferred below legacy IPv4 addressing, thus rendering ULA IPv6 deployment functionally unusable in IPv4 / IPv6 dual-stacked environments. The lack of a consistent and supportable way to manipulate this behavior, across all platforms and at scale is counter to the operational behavior of GUA IPv6 addressing on nearly all modern operating systems that leverage a preference model based on [RFC6724] .