Openflow was a secondary topic for me in this video. The real meat was Equinex talking about Internet Bypass. The idea that they can or will create a broker service that will be “Cloudified” or orchaestrated to set up peer to peer BGP connections between the provider and customer is a serious piece of innovation. I would have loved to hear someone from a cloud data center provider comment on this technology. It’s one thing to talk about orchestrating servers, hypervisors and datacenter networking but I have to imagine providers are loath to let cloud tools automate the creation of BGP routing at the edge of their network. This is where you can break the Internet but I see the appeal. I would have liked to be in this Q & A.

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.