ONS2016

The Northbound Interface (NBI) has been a topic of debate and confusion for years in the SDN controller and network operating system community. Primarily focused on making application development easier, the ONOS northbound provides multiple levels of abstraction to meet the requirements of different use cases. This talk will provide an overview of the northbound interfaces that are available in ONOS, as well as provide depth for select subsystems. For example, network control programs can use intents for network-centric policies, flow objectives for device-centric policies, and flow rules for per-table policies. This talk will also provide a discussion of the available mechanisms for NBI access (e.g. REST, Java interfaces, gRPC) and their merits.