Work

Lessons from the evolution of the Batfish configuration analysis tool

Year: 2023

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Batfish is a tool to analyze network configurations and forwarding. It has evolved from a research prototype to an industrial-strength product, guided by scalability, fidelity, and usability challenges encountered when analyzing complex, real-world networks. We share key lessons from this evolution, including how Datalog had significant limitations when generating and analyzing forwarding state and how binary decision diagrams (BDDs) proved highly versatile. We also describe our new techniques for addressing real-world challenges, which increase Batfish performance by three orders of magnitude and enable high-fidelity analysis of networks with thousands of nodes within minutes.

Source: ACM SIGCOMM Conference (SIGCOMM)

DOI: 10.1145/3603269.3604866

Authors: Matt Brown, Ari Fogel, Daniel Halperin, Victor Heorhiadi, Ratul Mahajan, Todd Millstein

Institutions: University of Washington, University of California, Los Angeles

Language: English

Topic: Software-Defined Networks and 5G

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Science Foundation