Building software defined networks for cloud computing has been a hot topic around the industry in the last year or so. There are blossoming open source projects, shiny new protocols and a few notable acquisitions.
At a recent Cloud Mafia meetup I gave a talk on the new emerging tunneling protocols that are being proposed to support cloud networking. My goal was to give the audience a sense of how these protocols work, why they are being built as they are and ultimately what the privacy and security concerns emerge as a result.
Slides are available (use the arrow keys to navigate) and a video of the talk is embedded below. For those tl;dr readers the major take-aways are:
- L2 in L3 tunneling is probably here to stay in the cloud
- Three emerging standards: VXLAN/NVGRE/STT
- In its raw form these protocols give a level of privacy but not security
- You should still use SSL/IPSec/etc between backend services
Thanks for watching.