Earlier this month I spent a few days at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. and walked away certain I watched history being made in the networking industry. The emergence of the OpenFlow standard and software defined networking have been on my radar for a while, but at this event, the future coalesced.
The secret is out on SDN.
I just listened to a talk from Berkeley professor Scott Shenker yesterday on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVs7Pc99S7w that gave an excellent breakdown of SDN and he spoke of the need of the Network Operating System before SDN's can become a reality.
When I think about it, I'm rather amazed that we haven't created an abstraction for the network. His talk speaks about how relatively easily we've done this at layer 2 but how difficult it is to do at higher layers due to the non-modular design of the network stack. Applications shouldn't be making calls to the network address but rather to the network service.
Interesting stuff. OpenFlow is a step in the right direction to creating the "BIOS" that we need. I'm especially happy that Google is at the bleeding edge of this in a production network.
