Vendors have long promised a self-driving network that can do all the under-the-hood tuning and adjustment without human assistance. But what enterprises seem to truly want is a network that is low-tech, and low-touch, like the cloud.
Hedgehog, a networking startup, has a solution that they might be looking for.
Low-Tech Equals Low-EffortDigital environments have grown infinitely more complex, and the solutions that have landed on top of them have only made the job harder for operators.
The complexity of the tasks is on an upward climb, and in practice, the myriad principles and solutions aimed at making networking processes low-effort all feel like different paths leading to the same place – a growing operational burden.
“A lot of products in the past have tried to do intent-based networking,” said Mike Dvorkin, co-founder and CTO of Hedgehog. “Intent is amazing, but what is going on underneath is always the challenge.”
The Hedgehog Open Network Fabric sidesteps a lot of the challenges resulting from technical complexity in the hybrid and distributed cloud by making operations hands-off. This makes things a lot simpler for people with no or little networking expertise like the DevOps and SREs.
“The whole thing is designed to provide a hands-free operation. You bring it into the environment, set up your rack, press the power button on and it just comes up. This way when you’re deploying things at the edge or data edge where you cannot have a dedicated networking personnel, it works,” he explained as he and the team showcased Hedgehog Open Network Fabric to the audience at the recent Networking Field Day event in California.
Hedgehog has two clear goals in sight: to deliver a network that is nimble and responsive to the customer’s use case – be it AI, ML or data analytics – and to make networking everywhere look and feel like the public cloud.
The Hedgehog Open Network FabricThe Hedgehog Network Fabric is easy to understand and demands very low skill. It is a software-driven solution that is deployed on top of Kubernetes. Similar to public cloud, the Fabric is built on VPCs or Virtual Private Clouds. VPCs are private virtual environments hosted within public cloud that provide isolated and highly scalable computing environments to customers.
Hedgehog VPC delivers multi-tenancy in hybrid cloud. Tenants can seamlessly run their virtual networks with their unique private address namespaces.
“Those VPCs are like network containers. You build a lot of services around them. We’re peering across VPCs and to the outside and a lot of exciting stuff is coming later,” Dvorkin told.
Operators, through a multi-tenant API, can define network intent for connectivity and isolation, and count on those to get pulled into the configuration of the software appliances and switches.
“It’s super-simple to operate. People who understand networking can dive under the hood and know what’s going on with the network without having to struggle with obstructions,” he said.
Hedgehog does not put customers on a vendor lock-in when it comes to appliances. They are free to use any whitebox or graybox Broadcom-based switches, SmartNICs/DPUs and CPUs from other vendors.
The software on the switch too is not proprietary, but an open-source NOS, SONiC. SONiC comes pre-bundled with Hedgehog, but customers have the additional flexibility to choose other distributions.
The Hedgehog Fabric uses Kubernetes API to control and manage its resources.
“The way we’re treating the network because of the Kubernetes control plane, would basically turn the entire Fabric into a huge Kubernetes cluster. So every switch, every NIC or DPU, every gateway becomes part of the cluster.”
Kubernetes has a reputation of being notoriously complex. To ensure that users do not have to experience the operational complexities, Hedgehog abstracts away all management tasks.
“If you don’t want to struggle with Kubernetes and learn new things, it’s completely hidden away from you – completely self-managed.”
Hedgehog’s networking infrastructure services include zero-touch provisioning. ZTP makes deployment super-simple. Operators can design the fabric based on what they need, and following the diagram, Hedgehog bootstraps and configures the devices automatically.
“Each of the switches that we support, there is a piece of metadata that normalizes it so we can work with it.”
Dvorkin highlighted front-panel booting, a feature that lets switches to be booted on front-panel ports, eliminating the need for a separate management network. Chainbooting on Hedgehognallows operators to boot the network from the nodes that are up. Down the line, the company plans to add switch-level caching to allow nodes to be booted from neighbor nodes.
Hedgehog supports multiple topologies – collapsed core, CLOS networks and small mesh environments.
“If you have a small enough network and you don’t want to waste money on spines, but just hook things up in the mesh, you can hook up gateways to that and watch your compute gear,” he said.
Hedgehog does not rely on a separate out-of-band network. Everything is managed in-band.
“We police and control management and protocols traffic because you’re now sharing things with tenant networks. We also do full-on isolation and not just from a performance perspective, but also from security perspective.”
Going forward, Hedgehog will introduce new features and functionality making it a complete networking platform.
For more, be sure to check out Hedgehog’s presentations from the recent Networking Field Day event on the Tech Field Day website.
© Gestalt IT, LLC for Gestalt IT: Hedgehog – A Low-Tech Network Fabric for the Hybrid and Distributed Cloud