OneWAN is Better Than Two - Unifying a Split WAN Architecture

Explore a groundbreaking approach to wide-area network (WAN) architecture in this 16-minute conference talk from USENIX NSDI '23. Delve into Microsoft's innovative ONEWAN project, which unifies their previously split SWAN and CORE networks into a single, software-defined WAN capable of handling both inter-datacenter and Internet traffic. Learn about the challenges faced in scaling up network and routing table sizes, and discover the novel "traffic steering" paradigm developed to manage increased network scale using existing equipment. Gain insights into the techniques employed to overcome scaling issues in SDN traffic engineering, including rapid path-finding and chained TE optimization solvers. Understand how ONEWAN pioneers the application of software-defined techniques in an Internet backbone, successfully scaling to a network 10 times larger than its predecessor.