Configuration management at massive scale: system design and experience

Abstract

The development and maintenance of network device configurations is one of the central challenges faced by large network providers. Current network management systems fail to meet this challenge primarily because of their inability to adapt to rapidly evolving customer and provider-network needs, and because of mismatches between the conceptual models of the tools and the services they must support. In this paper, we present the Presto configuration management system that attempts to address these failings in a comprehensive and flexible way. Developed for and used during the last 5 years within a large ISP network, Presto constructs device-native configurations based on the composition of configlets representing different services or service options. Configlets are compiled by extracting and manipulating data from external systems as directed by the Presto configuration scripting and template language. We outline the configuration management needs of large-scale network providers, introduce the PRESTO system and configuration language, and reflect upon our experiences developing PRESTO configured VPN and VoIP services. In doing so, we describe how PRESTO promotes healthy configuration management practices.