Sometimes the stars do align: Open Networking Summit organized their Service Provider Accelerate Workshop just a day prior to Network Field Day, so I had the fantastic opportunity to attend both.

I didn’t know what to expect from an event full of SDN/NFV thought leaders, and was extremely pleasantly surprised by the amount of realistic down-to-earth information I got.

As always, there was the usual group of people reinventing old wheels, and the occasional vendor pitches, but there was also occasional pure gold, including:

• Amin Vahdat from Google telling us how the server/OS industry still doesn’t have a large-scale cluster OS management solution 30 years after they started talking about replacing mainframes with workstation clusters – a refreshing reminder amid the usual yammering about networking being stuck in the past. Some hard-to-do things take time;
• Al Blackburn from AT&T explaining how they started their Domain 2.0 project by focusing on transformation on their internal habits, processes and culture, and major retraining efforts – obviously at least some people agree with my “the technology won’t save you” mantra;
• Yukio Ito from NTT describing the OpenFlow-related problems they encountered in their deployment (not surprisingly, mostly aligned with what I was telling you in the OpenFlow Deep Dive webinar, although they did discover a few additional glitches);
• Damascene Joachimpillai from Verizon explaining their reservations about scalability of OpenFlow and the viability of service chaining favored by most NFV proponents;
• Albert Greenberg from Microsoft Azure talking about their implementation of Network-State Management Service;
• Multiple speakers focusing on the lack of NFV orchestration, and lack of integration with OSS/BSS systems;

Was it worth attending the workshop? Absolutely. ONS team did a fantastic job. Thank you!!!