[Video] Glenn Sullivan, Co-Founder of SnapRoute, Inc, is the latest Industry Titan to be grilled by EPS. SnapRoute is a very exciting spin out from a Data Center Group at Apple, who were using disaggregated networking long before it was cool, to drive iCloud, iTunes and other Apple user services. Glenn talks about the genesis of SnapRoute, how they are bringing networking into the cloud native era, containers and how Kubernetes fits in.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Glenn Sullivan, the Co-Founder of SnapRoute, Inc., who have developed the industry’s first Cloud Native Network Operating System (CN-NOS). Prior to setting up SnapRoute, Glenn, and his fellow Co-Founder, Adam Casella, built out the Apple data centers that drive iCloud, iTunes and other Apple user services. They were using a combination of disaggregated networking, and traditional networking solutions, and they identified the gaps in the solutions - from monitoring and orchestration, to automation. They recognized that they needed a new kind of platform that embraced a microservices architecture, so that application workloads and other infrastructure can work together, and so SnapRoute was born - to address those gaps and make a network OS that was made by operators for operators.
 

SnapRoute CN-NOS is a fully containerized microservices platform that is an network OS, whereby each individual component of the system is containerized, using Kubernetes to orchestrate all of those containers. Talking about its benefits, Glenn says "When we talk about cloud native, we mean cloud native from an orchestration and instrumentation perspective, and we've chosen Kubernetes as the standard platform, so Kubernetes is the core of infrastructure. You can configure the network device just like it's any other node in your Kubernetes cluster, and you can use all of the things you've learned doing other cloud native deployments on the network device. We're the first network OS that has cloud native built in from the ground up."

Check out our full selection of open networking switches here, find out more about SnapRoute here or use our Switch Selector Tool to find out which switches are compatible with SnapRoute's CN-NOS here. If you would like to learn more about Containers and Kubernetes, you can read our Containers, Docker and Kubernetes: A Beginner’s Guide here.