Does networking need a DevOps movement?

Updated: The networking industry is set for a change as the shifts caused by the needs of webscale and cloud operators as well as virtualization bring complexity and costs to moving data around a data center. The solution appears to be software-defined networks that can be programmed and virtualized. But if networks start to look like the cloud does the field need its own DevOps movement?

Earlier this week at the Open Networking Summit, the term DevOps came up often enough that I began to wonder how far people would take software-defined networks, and where the people who could understand systems level network complexity as well as the overall application programming would come from. The DevOps culture that emerged from the cloud computing world developed in response to the blending of a system administrators role with that of an application programmer. The idea that IT generalists who can understand broadly the entire IT stack are essential and that both programmers and systems administrators have a role in keeping production apps running is a new one.

So when Rob Vietzke and Matt Davy from Indiana University got onstage to discuss how theyve created a self-provisioning ethernet network for developers to play on, I wondered where in the networking world these developers would come from. If telecommunications providers want to build network services applications, they will need a culture that encourages people to think differently up and down the stack about networking. They may also need a programming language.

The point is, the hype around software-defined networking and network virtualization is building, but the tools to take advantage of programmable networks arent quite in place. Indiana and Internet 2 are providing a platform, but do we still need a language and how will we train the people? Feel free to discuss below.

Update: Moments after I published this Kowsik Guruswamy, the co-founder and CTO of Mu Dynamics, reminded me that already vendors are trying to support this with developer-friendly tools such as Junipers network sandbox. It has a fancier name, but essentially this is a cloud-based network that a developer can mock up as their production network to test new applications in, so they can see how the network needs to be configured.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Samsung asks ITC to ban the import of Apple devices

Image
The back-and-forth in the patent dispute between Samsung and Apple continues, with Samsung filing a request for a U.S. import ban against the iPhone, iPad and iPod, FOSS Patents reports . The complaint was filed with the International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday. The ITC is a government regulatory body, which acts independently of the courts. Apple seems to be gearing up for a preliminaryinjunctionrequest in its legal case against Samsung in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but it hasnt sought any action from the ITC, unlike in previous cases against competing smartphone manufacturers such as HTC . Samsungs move is a clever way to beat Apple to a potentially hobbling import ban, since the ITCs decision is independent of the ongoing court case, and a final decision is reached within a fairly set time frame of 16 to 18 months, once the ITC agrees to investigate. Apple is likely to respond with a complaint of its own, according to FOSS Patents Floria...
Keep reading

China to make Tesla the next BMW

Image
Tesla's China business is booming Hong-Kong traded Tencent, a company best known for its WeChat messaging app, disclosed in a Tuesday filing that it's  taken a 5 percent stake in Tesla for $1.78 billion.  The investment follows Tencent's new stake in taxi-hailing app Didi Chuxing, which can be accessed through WeChat. "I think Tencent likely wanted exposure to a company that was growing very quickly in electric and autonomous" vehicles, said Tasha Keeney, an analyst on the  ARK Industrial Innovation ETF (ARKQ) , whose top holding is Tesla. "We think the autonomous mobility as a service market could be $10 trillion in gross sales globally by the early 2030s, and companies like Tesla or  Baidu  could take a cut of that," she said. Tesla declined to comment to CNBC. Tencent did not respond to emailed requests for comment. A Tencent spokesperson  told The Wall Street Journal  that "Tesla is a global pioneer at the forefront of new te...
Keep reading

Who Will Create iTunes for the Cloud?

Image
If youre like me, your digital media life is messy. If I were to take inventory of where all my digital media resides, the list would include Flickr, Facebook, iTunes, Android, Netflix, YouTube, Picasa, Flipshare, Amazon, Kindle, iBooks, Windows PC, Mac, iPad and so on. Like I said, a mess. And while Im an early adopter, Im probably not very different from tens of millions of consumers who face digital media anarchy every day across the various screens, accounts and software populating their life. Apple is the first company to even come close to helping us manage this chaos, with iTunes. After it was first introduced a decade ago, the service becamehugely popular partly because it was the first cohesive management tool for first music, then later other types of media. But iTunes has gotten flabby with age , and the creaking has gotten more noticeable lately as the cloud becomes more and more important for digital media storage. In a way, iTunes has become the Windows of consumer medi...
Keep reading