High-Level Concepts for Northbound APIs: An Interview Study

There is little work which empirically analyses network management practice with respect to policy creation and maintenance. To address this gap we carried out five semi structured interviews of network administrators at a diverse range of enterprises. Analysis of the results led us to make the following contributions: We introduce a number of high-level orthogonal concepts (dimensions) for representing network policy; we identify a set of real-world network policies; and show how each of these may be represented by these dimensions. There are a number of use cases for our work: Engineers or researchers looking to create or refine high-level network management frameworks (such as northbound APIs for SDN); Network administrators looking to document their network policy in a consistent format; Researchers looking to develop empirical studies in this area.