2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Pp. 73–86 of the Proceedings
Configuration Management at Massive Scale: System Design and Experience
William Enck and Patrick McDaniel, Pennsylvania State University; Subhabrata Sen, Panagiotis Sebos, and Sylke Spoerel, AT&T Research; Albert Greenberg, Microsoft Research; Sanjay Rao, Purdue University; William Aiello, University of British Columbia
Abstract
The development and maintenance of network device configurations is
one of the central challenges faced by large network providers. Current
network management systems fail to meet this challenge primarily
because of their inability to adapt to rapidly evolving customer and
provider-network needs, and because of mismatches between the
conceptual models of the tools and the services they must support. In
this paper, we present the PRESTO configuration management system that
attempts to address these failings in a comprehensive and flexible
way. Developed for and deployed over the last 4 years within a
large ISP network, PRESTO constructs device-native configurations based on
the composition of configlets representing different services or
service options. Configlets are compiled by extracting and
manipulating data from external systems as directed by the PRESTO
configuration scripting and template language. We outline the
configuration management needs of large-scale network providers,
introduce the PRESTO system and configuration language, and
demonstrate the use, workflows, and ultimately the platform's
flexibility via an example of VPN service. We conclude by considering
future work and reflect on the operators' experiences with PRESTO.
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