Software-Defined Network. From Wikipedia: “Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane). The inventors and vendors of these systems claim that this simplifies networking.”, “Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture purporting to be dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, seeking to be suitable for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. SDN architectures decouple network control and forwarding functions, enabling network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted from applications and network services.”

Wow, I almost completed my bullshit-bingo card.

Will the network engineer become obsolete ? Decoupling the data plane from the control plane sound like a interesting ideea but right now SDN only exists in the marketing plane.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the ideea, I just don’t think it would be necessarly a “Good Ideea”. SOHO ? Sure, why not. Datacenter ? Could work since you also (mostly) control the traffic source. But ISP/Carrier ? I would not like to see the day the controller decides to reroute some traffic and in the process becomes isolated from the network or even better it isolates some remote node.

But I guess you can always have the excuse “the computer says so”.