Navigating Network Complexity: Next-generation Routing with SDN, Service Virtualization, and Service Chaining

Chapter 6. Managing Design Complexity

The last chapter examined the tradeoffs engineers and architects need to consider when designing the topology and control planes of a network. How can the network engineer manage these tradeoffs—state versus stretch, topology versus the speed of convergence, and virtualization versus design complexity? When should one (for instance, virtualization) be chosen over the other (for instance, fate sharing)? These are, in fact, some of the most difficult decisions to make in the field of network engineering, perhaps even more so because they rarely come to the surface as intentional decisions at all.

This chapter will consider a few ways engineers can manage these types of decisions, from the traditional to the ...