本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Every so many years, when some problem imposes a complexity so complicated for our poor little human brain to consume, another layer of abstraction and another layer of automation will come to the rescue.
That's happening in the network world today.
Back in the programming world, Object Oriented A/D/P (analysis, design, and programming) is not something new. Actually it was quite old if measured by IT time. It has becoming popular since the early 90’s, when I was a still a undergraduate in computer science major. The concept was to use another model to provide a different kind of abstraction when procedural based programming methods encountered a bottle neck due to ever-increasing complexity in the problem domain. Either it succeeded or failed, it was beyond this discussion. But defintely it provided an alternative approach.
In the network world, different layers of abstraction have been provided by many mechanisms, including the well known and well conceived OSI Seven Layer model, well accepted and well adapted TCP/IP protocols, and all the routing protocols, firewall rules, and application load balancers, WAN optimization boxes, etc etc. It’s been going well for more than 20 years, until now.
Now, the network world is facing some exceedingly complex challenges:
- Virtualization of the server world has revolutionized how computing is done. With the world’s 70+% work load is being performed from virtual machines, with the requirements to extend network visibility and optimization inside millions if not billions of hypervisors, with the notion of moving a virtual machine wherever a resource is available and doesn’t care layer two layer three boundaries, the complexity increased exponentially;
- When the demand to make network provision change within minutes to accommodate new application change, the Assessment=>Design=>Modeling=>Schedule a change window=>Make Configuration change=>SIT/UAT=>Post change support paradigm just doesn't work;
- The cost to maintain a complex network and make it work has ever been increasing since the Internet came into being. Many companies are feeling the pain and looking at ways to cut this cost (of course, including that many CCIE’s salary);
- The CLOUD, right, the cloud, the huge, highly condensed data centers and data centre interconnect. The well established layered hierarchical design model doesn’t apply any more. With a flattened network, with millions of host based routing, with the requirements of ultra low latency for east west traffic, with the need of no more than two hops away anywhere in the data centre, everything is gonna change or has been changing.
Apparently, another layer of abstraction is badly needed - with this new abstraction will sure come another round of automation. So came all the fuss of SDN, Overlay model, and Application Centric Infrastructure.
to be continued.,...更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
That's happening in the network world today.
Back in the programming world, Object Oriented A/D/P (analysis, design, and programming) is not something new. Actually it was quite old if measured by IT time. It has becoming popular since the early 90’s, when I was a still a undergraduate in computer science major. The concept was to use another model to provide a different kind of abstraction when procedural based programming methods encountered a bottle neck due to ever-increasing complexity in the problem domain. Either it succeeded or failed, it was beyond this discussion. But defintely it provided an alternative approach.
In the network world, different layers of abstraction have been provided by many mechanisms, including the well known and well conceived OSI Seven Layer model, well accepted and well adapted TCP/IP protocols, and all the routing protocols, firewall rules, and application load balancers, WAN optimization boxes, etc etc. It’s been going well for more than 20 years, until now.
Now, the network world is facing some exceedingly complex challenges:
- Virtualization of the server world has revolutionized how computing is done. With the world’s 70+% work load is being performed from virtual machines, with the requirements to extend network visibility and optimization inside millions if not billions of hypervisors, with the notion of moving a virtual machine wherever a resource is available and doesn’t care layer two layer three boundaries, the complexity increased exponentially;
- When the demand to make network provision change within minutes to accommodate new application change, the Assessment=>Design=>Modeling=>Schedule a change window=>Make Configuration change=>SIT/UAT=>Post change support paradigm just doesn't work;
- The cost to maintain a complex network and make it work has ever been increasing since the Internet came into being. Many companies are feeling the pain and looking at ways to cut this cost (of course, including that many CCIE’s salary);
- The CLOUD, right, the cloud, the huge, highly condensed data centers and data centre interconnect. The well established layered hierarchical design model doesn’t apply any more. With a flattened network, with millions of host based routing, with the requirements of ultra low latency for east west traffic, with the need of no more than two hops away anywhere in the data centre, everything is gonna change or has been changing.
Apparently, another layer of abstraction is badly needed - with this new abstraction will sure come another round of automation. So came all the fuss of SDN, Overlay model, and Application Centric Infrastructure.
to be continued.,...更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net