ONF Connect 2018

The engine of ONOS is its distributed applications platform, and central to building distributed applications on ONOS are its distributed primitives. Primitives provide application developers the building blocks needed to create scalable, fault-tolerant applications. Such applications can range in complexity from basic persistence and replication to intricate applications that control concurrent access to shared resources through partitioning, leader election, or distributed locking. But while distributed primitives can look a lot like the data structures and synchronization primitives Java developers work with every day, in practice, when deployed in distributed contexts, they can have limitations that may often be difficult to recognize and which when left unaccounted for can impact both the stability and scalability of distributed applications.

In this presentation, Jordan Halterman will identify those limitations for application developers. The presentation will provide a high level overview of the primitives exposed to ONOS developers for building distributed applications and discuss some of the pitfalls to avoid when building distributed applications in ONOS, with a focus on identifying distributed primitive code smells, avoiding performance bottlenecks, and handling a variety of complex failure scenarios in distributed applications.