Tesuto, a Los Angeles, California based start-up, is launching with two services: network emulation and validation platform. Hossein Lotfi, formerly of Google and Verizon EdgeCast, co-founded the company earlier this year with the mission to help network operators significantly reduce change-induced outages and bring their network uptime closer to the five-nines availability. The team behind Tesuto is growing and has recently received initial seed money. The company will be seeking Series A funding next year. The objective was to offer network validation that operators can trust to reliably test intended config changes when rolled out to the production network.
At launch, the team decided to set themselves an ambitious goal and get “from zero to MVP” in under 3 months in order to have a basic product ready for the NANOG meeting in October. The demo was indeed ready for NANOG, which helped yield helpful feedback from the industry to ensure the product roadmap is aligned with industry needs. Tesuto’s engineering team is now laying down the final touches to its core platform and user interface whilst its sales team and co-founders start to work with vendors on expanding its emulation library.
Tesuto means “test” in Japanese, and according to Lotfi, “is a reminder for us to keep working tirelessly towards true perfection”.
The Background to Network Emulation
Some leading networks have approached full automation with rigid device, configuration and topology requirements; other networks still necessitate human intervention for some aspect of their configuration management. At any rate, there is always a central factor mitigating against maintaining continuous automation: “Network Evolution”.
The goal of pursuing an ever more cost-effective reliable, secure and programmable network is endless. This means that technology changes and software updates are implemented regularly and operators thus need to upgrade automation from one network generation to another. Whenever configuration changes are applied, there is always a risk of service disruption, outage or at worst, a security vulnerability; however skilled the network engineer is.
Until recently, the networking industry has relied upon testing in network labs followed by a slow canary rollout. The problem with this approach is that labs are not representative of production scale and canary rollout can’t test the end state of the network. Problems happen and the result is network downtime. Tesuto was founded to work out another approach that will significantly reduce change-induced outages in networks.
Tesuto’s Approach to Network Validation
There are currently only a handful of companies working in the network validation space, and two possible approaches, both still in the emerging phase:
- Formal Verification
- Large Scale Emulation
Tesuto has looked carefully at both options and decided to focus its efforts on emulation. Lofti will be revealing more information about Tesuto’s network emulation techniques in the coming weeks.