nanog mailing list archives

Re: questions asked during network engineer interview


From: William Herrin <bill () herrin us>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:21:11 -0700

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 9:57 PM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom com> wrote:
Suffice it to say, to this day, we still don't know what SDN means to
us, hehe.

Hi Mark,

The Software Defined Network concept started as, "Let's use commodity
hardware running commodity operating systems to form the control plane
for our network devices." The concept has expanded somewhat to: "Lets
use commodity hardware running commodity operating systems AS our
network devices." For example, if you build a high-rate firewall with
DPDK on Linux, that's now considered SDN since its commodity hardware,
commodity OS and custom packet handling (DPDK) that skips the OS.

This is happening a lot in the big shops like Amazon that can afford
to employ software developers to write purpose-built network code.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William Herrin
bill () herrin us
https://bill.herrin.us/


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