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):

• NTT Global IP Network Configuration Tool (NANOG 54): http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog54/presentations/Tuesday/Morris.pdf
• Antifragile organization: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2499552
• Resilience engineering - learn to embrace failure: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2371297

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