Transactional Thoughts on a Stormy Night

It was a dark stormy autumn night and three networking engineers had nothing better to do than ponder the heavy topics of transactional consistency in a distributed SDN environment in Episode 16 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

Here are a few of the topics that crossed our minds:

  • What happens when an SDN-driven network update fails?
  • Will SDN save us from manual errors? Will it make us more precise?
  • How will we cope with API/CLI changes between software releases?
  • Automating everything might result in making a big mess out of everything.
  • We should design for failures, not try to do everything to avoid them, and continuously test our network under failure scenarios
  • Should we leave the underlay alone and never touch it (like we never touched the optical transport two decades ago)?
  • We have to change our way of thinking and get used (again) to the benefits of decoupling;

Finally, there were two evergreen topics we couldn’t possibly avoid:

  • Per-application appliances as compared to big bad boxes;
  • Lack of ASICs in network appliances.

And here’s the list of things we mentioned (and promised to get them into show notes):

Enjoy the podcast and don’t forget to subscribe to the Software Gone Wild feed.

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