Declarative configuration management for complex and dynamic networks

Abstract

Network management and operations are complicated, tedious, and error-prone, requiring signifcant human involvement and domain knowledge. As the complexity involved inevitably grows due to larger scale networks and more complex protocol features, human operators are increasingly short-handed, despite the best effort from existing support systems to make it otherwise. This paper presents coolaid, a system under which the domain knowledge of device vendors and service providers is formally captured by a declarative language. Through effcient and powerful rule-based reasoning on top of a database-like abstraction over a network of devices, coolaid enables new management primitives to perform network-wide reasoning, prevent misconfguration, and automate network confguration, while requiring minimum operator effort. We describe the design and prototype implementation of coolaid, and demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability through various realistic network management tasks.