Faucet - the future of networking

At the NZOS Award's ceremony last week: REANNZ's Kit Lorier and Angela Nash, with Richard Nelson and Brad Cowie from the University of Waikato, and Michael Fincham from Catalyst who nominated Faucet for the Award

REANNZ is very proud that the Faucet Foundation was the winner of the New Zealand Open Source Software Project Award announced last week. 

The Faucet Foundation project is an open source SDN (software-defined networking) OpenFlow controller for production networks.  Its premise is that networks can work more like flexible software. 

Angela Nash, REANNZ Chief Operating Officer and co-Chair of the Faucet Foundation, says “We are proud of this acknowledgement of the Faucet project, which is a world-leading step-change that will redefine the future of networking globally”.

“Faucet is a way of working that that allows for high levels of flexibility within your network, you effectively treat your network like a cloud application, you can upgrade quickly to acquire new capabilities, offer new services and respond to security threats, faster than with non-SDN networks which can often take years to upgrade. The aim of the game is give engineers, and the network itself, the ability to respond at pace to the changing needs of the network and business.  

Faucet moves network control functions (like routing protocols, neighbour discovery, and switching algorithms) to vendor independent server-based software, as opposed to traditional router or switch embedded firmware.  These functions are easy to manage, test, and extend with modern systems management best practices and tools. 

Faucet has been developed in New Zealand and deployed globally via GitHub.  As an Open Source project it draws input from the wider SDN community with the core code base being developed jointly between some of the founding participants including Josh Bailey (Google), Kit Lorier (REANNZ) and Brad Cowie (Waikato University).

A thriving and rapidly growing global community is working to make FAUCET one of the international leaders in this field.  It has been deployed in production at sites around the world including REANNZ and allied research and education networks: ESNet (Energy Sciences Network, USA), Victoria University of Wellington, Allied Telesis, The University of Tokyo, the WIDE Project in Japan, Toulouse Internet Exchange and the WAND Research Group based at the University of Waikato .

Other finalists in the category were the Online Dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language, and the New Zealand ORCID Hub.

Thanks to Catalyst and Internet NZ, key sponsors of the New Zealand Open Source Awards.

For a non-techie view of production SDN and how NZ is leading the way, read Ange’s blog.