Cisco and CENGN Join Together for the Latest Ottawa Open Source Networking Meetup!
Last week we organized another successful meetup at the Innovation Centre at Bayview Yards (ICBY) for June’s Open Source Networking Meetup!
The Ottawa Open Source Networking Meetup is a Linux Foundation initiative to provide a place for top ICT professionals, students, and community techies to gather together to network, enjoy food and drinks, and participate in discussions about the latest and greatest open source technology. During each meetup, speakers who have been working on various open source networking projects take to the stage to share knowledge with the audience.
Last week’s event kickstarted with mingling and networking amongst peers and colleagues over some complimentary pizza, beer, and soda. After an introduction made by Marketing Manager, Rick Penwarden, the show was ready to begin.
Gary Boon, Senior Technical Lead from CENGN’s member company Cisco, and our first presenter of the evening, started the night with a bang, presenting ‘An Introduction to FD.io’s VPP’. During his slides, Gary covered a range of topics on FD.io’s VPP (Vector Packet Processing), making it informative for both the pros in the audience, and for those who were hearing about this technology for the first time. He discussed how VPP stands out from other packet processing alternatives for commodity CPUs, why Cisco chose to adopt this technology, how it helps to solve their problems, and finally tips and tricks on how to leverage VPP for the audiences’ own solutions.
Gary left the audience with some key takeaways. For starters, in his presentation Gary emphasized the importance of avoiding per-packet “taxes” by moving costs out of VPP and into the management/control plane. He also stressed the importance of avoiding table/memory management during packet processing by living within your means with memory allocation at init time. Lastly, he wanted the audience to consider shared memory as a high-performance alternative to message-based or in-band transfers. This expertise left audience members with not only an introduction to the FD.io project, but also with advice on how to properly leverage VPP to your advantage.
Next up was CENGN’s own Kyler Manseau, who is a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at the company. He presented ‘Programming the Network with SRv6’ exploring the emerging SRv6, or segment routing for IPv6, and discussing its key features. He looked into how SRv6 can be used to program a network, engineer the flow of traffic, and integrate into service-chaining with NFV. He then preformed a demo and opened the floor to any questions.
Kyler’s presentation went deep on how segment routing can be used to remove multiple protocols from the network core while still providing similar functionality. Using SRv6, a network engineer can begin to think of the network as something that can be programmed for many custom use-cases with the well-established IPv6 protocol.
Kyler joined our team last year to begin his yearlong student internship term with CENGN, and we’ve been fortunate to watch him grow professionally over the last 9 months! CENGN works hard to ensure that during a student’s time with us they are given opportunities like this to expand their knowledge and add to their portfolio, and we place great emphasis on giving students challenging work that will help them in their future endeavors!
Interested in becoming a CENGN student? Check out our current opportunities here!
As attendees finished their food and drinks, they lingered a little longer to talk tech with the presenters and fellow guests at the meetup. It was a great opportunity to make connections and learn more about fascinating emerging innovative technology.
If you missed this meetup don’t worry! CENGN makes a point of hosting OSN meetups every couple of months to help continue to bring the tech community together. Not only does it help facilitate the collaboration of knowledge among workers and students in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, but it also keeps CENGN in the loop on the most innovative next generation technology. We want to continue the information sharing and expansion of knowledge to help strengthen Canada’s network talent pool solidify the country’s ICT global competitiveness, leading to economic prosperity for all!
A huge thank you to Invest Ottawa for giving us a venue and The Linux Foundation for sponsoring this event! We also want to give a big shout out to Gary Boon, and Kyler Manseau for making the meetup such a success!
Didn’t have a chance to connect with us at the meetup? Check out where we’ll be next by clicking the button below!
About the Author
CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.
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