Everywhere you turn, people are talking about software defined networking.  The influence can be felt in every facet of the industry.  Major players are trying to come to grips with the shift in power.  Small vendors are ramping up around ideas and looking to the future.  Professionals are simultaneously excited for change and fearful of upsetting the status quo.  But will all of these things happen overnight?

Not Built In A Day, But Laying Bricks Every Hour

The truth of SDN is that it’s going to take some time for all the pieces to fall into place.  Take a look at the recent Apple Pay launch.  Inside of a week, it has risen to become a very significant part of the mobile payment industry, even if the installed base of users is exclusive to iPhone [6,6+] owners.  But did this revolution happen in the span of a couple of days?

Apple Pay works because Apple spent months, if not years, designing the best way to provide transactions from a phone.  It leverages TouchID for security, a concept introduced last year.  It uses Near Field Communication (NFC) readers, which have been in place for a couple of years.  I even talked about NFC three years ago.  That means the technology to support Apple Pay has been in place for a while.

That kind of support structure is needed to make SDN work the way we want it to.  There’s no magic wand that will convert your infrastructure to SDN overnight.  There is no SDNecronomicon to reference for solving scaling issues or interoperability concerns.  What’s required is the hard work of taking the ideas and processes around SDN and implementing them today.

SDN feels like a radical shift to traditional networking because it’s a foreign concept.  If you had told the first generation iPhone users their device would be a application computer with the capability to pay for purchases wirelessly they would have laughed at you and told you it was a fantasy.  That sufficiently advanced technology was beyond their understanding at the time.

SDN is no different.  The steps being taken today to solve traditional networking problems will feel antiquated in four to five years.  But that foundation must be laid in order to make SDN work in the future.  SDN won’t transform the industry overnight, but we have to keep making advances and pushing forward to make the important gains no matter how small they are.

Not Built In A Day, But It Burned In One

The fear of SDN leads to the dark side of standards adoption.  Arguments. In-fighting. Posturing. Interests making decisions not because they are right for customers but because they protect market share.  If SDN fails in the long term, it will be because of these dark elements and not a technological constraint.

Nothing is immune to politics.  Linux has been more or less standardized for years.  Yet tech advances are still hotly debated.  Go mention systemd to your local Linux hacker and prepare for the onslaught of discussion.  Linux has had much less pressure from these kinds of discussions by virtue of the core kernel being very stable and maintained by a small team.  SDN is very different.

The competing ideas around SDN drive innovation, but also threaten it.  The industry will eventually standardize on OpenDaylight for their controller, much like the server industry standardized on Linux for appliances.  But will that same consensus lead to stagnation? Will innovation simply happen as vendors attempt to modify ODL just enough to make their offering look superior?  Before you say that it’s impossible go and find a reference TRILL implementation.

SDN will succeed because the momentum behind it won’t allow it to fail.  But much like Rome, we need to build SDN with the proper architecture.  Simply laying bricks haphazardly won’t fix our problems.  If the infrastructure is bad enough, we may even need our own Nero to “fix” things again.  Momentum without direction is a useless force.  We need to ensure that SDN is headed in the right direction where it benefits customers and users first.  Profit margins are secondary to that.

Tom’s Take

An idea can transform an industry.  A simple thought about making things better can drag the community out of stagnation and into a Renaissance.  That we are witness to an industry shift is undeniable at this point, especially given that so many things are becoming “software defined”.  However, we must face the truth that this little hobby project won’t produce results overnight.  Hard work and planning will win the day.  Rome went from being a village among hills to the largest power in the Western world.  But that didn’t happen overnight.  The long game of SDN needs to be played one move at a time.  And the building of the SDN empire will take more than a single day.