GitFlow: flow revision management for software-defined networks

Our work addresses the problem of revision control for flow state management in SDN-enabled networks, so that the underlying data plane might be able to provide better state protection, provenance, ease of programmability, and support for multiple applications. Inspired by the revision control tools in the software development world, we propose an abstraction and a system called GitFlow, which provides flow state revisioning in the SDN context. The core idea of GitFlow is to run a repository server to maintain the authoritative copy of the flow configuration state and track additional meta data for each evolving snapshot of the flow state. When multiple applications make incremental commits to state, our system also automates conflict resolution by rebasing new flow state with committed flow state. We envision that our revision control abstraction will provide safety in the data plane and better programmability in the control plane.