In my last blog, I mentioned that we might be on the verge of “application networking”. Some of my readers who know me sent emails asking if I could define exactly what I mean by that. I can do that, but perhaps better still I can offer the definition that enterprises have evolved during the…
There were a couple of interesting pieces in the trade news yesterday, and the combination of the two may be more interesting yet. One piece was from SDxCentral, commenting on the reported difficulties associated with container deployments, and the other piece from Light Reading on the addition of zero-touch provisioning to SD-WAN. Combined, these articles…
Are we finally realizing that NFV is going to fail without change? I’ve been saying that for years, but an article in Light Reading last week suggested that operators in a conference were increasingly skeptical about both SDN and NFV. Skepticism about the present is at least a credible driver to changes in the future. …
What does an event-driven app look like? That might seem to be a silly question, but as we move toward at least some level of realization of the Internet of Things (IoT) and as serverless cloud computing services aimed at event processing proliferate, it’s a question we need to answer. Most developers, consultants, analysts, and…
For decades, enterprises have told me that the data center drives the network. The vendors they said had the greatest influence on their overall network strategic planning were those who had the greatest strategic influence in the data center. For the last ten years, the data center has been evolving to meet the requirements of…
What’s next in DevOps, or orchestration or automation or whatever you like to call it? That’s a question that was asked (in a more limited form) in a new DevOps LinkedIn group, and I think it’s an important one if we address it the right way. At the DevOps or tool level, a question like…
Hosting service features in some form is going to happen. The timing is fuzzy, the specifics of the technology to be used is perhaps even fuzzier, but it’s going to happen. This is a good point in our hosting-features evolution to think a bit about the options available and the things that might help select…
We all know the phrase “You can’t get there from here.” It’s a joke to illustrate that there are some logical destinations that don’t have any realistic migration path. Some wonder whether a new network model of any kind, whether it’s white-box-and-OpenFlow, hosted routing, or NFV, is practical because of the migration difficulties. Operators themselves…
Every change you make to a network changes how you look at is. That changes what you look at it with, meaning the technologies, tools, and practices involved in monitoring and testing. Networks are a cooperative association of devices, coordinated in some way to fit a specific mission. Getting them to do that, or determining…
Open feature software and hardware platforms for devices could revolutionize networking, at many levels. I blogged about the service impacts earlier, so now it’s time to look at what could happen to the industry overall. I think everyone understands that the changes would be radical, but not universal. Even in the vendor space, there could…