On 21/Jul/20 21:21, William Herrin wrote:
The Software Defined Network concept started as, "Let's use commodity hardware running commodity operating systems to form the control plane for our network devices." The concept has expanded somewhat to: "Lets use commodity hardware running commodity operating systems AS our network devices." For example, if you build a high-rate firewall with DPDK on Linux, that's now considered SDN since its commodity hardware, commodity OS and custom packet handling (DPDK) that skips the OS.
This is happening a lot in the big shops like Amazon that can afford to employ software developers to write purpose-built network code.
It's possible that I wasn't clear. For the avoidance of doubt, "we still don't know what SDN means to us" means "we are not sold on the snake oil". Mark.