Re: questions asked during network engineer interview

[Jeff Bacon <bacon () twinight org>]

> Who said anything about boxing your tooling in to SDN tech? You
> described Software Defined Networking as a rabbit hole and snake oil.
> It isn't. It's a class of tools in the networking toolbox and an
> increasingly useful one.

My toolbox in the garage has torque wrenches and allen wrenches and a 
GS-911 for talking to the Motronic on my bike, too. It's a pretty useful 
toolbox. I use all of them. I don't keep them all in the same drawer of 
the toolbox, though. Guessing you don't either. Or if you do, I 
*probably* don't want you working on my bike.

I for one would be happy if someone came up with some different acronyms 
and subdivide the "world of SDN" into some number of 
sub-techonologies/practices that were at least a little more cohesive 
with each other so then at least we'd know what keywords to fit into our 
news feeds so we could pay better attention to the bits that are more 
relevant to where we are. Ansible/netmiko/<whatevertoolset>+CI/CD 
applied to kit (and people) does not resemble OpenDaylight or what 
hyperscalers are doing with DPDK on cards or the Microsoft FPGA-NIC 
trickery except in the broadest of views. All are good. Sure, they all 
belong in the toolbox. But maybe not in the same drawer.

As it is, we have marketing people sticking "SDN" onto every bloody 
thing that comes along in the hopes that it'll better catch the 
attention of someone without enough of a clue that they'll cough up (and 
leave someone else to figure out what to do with it). I freely admit 
that's just what they do and expecting them to do anything different is 
wishful thinking, but I don't see any of us doing anything about it 
except creating long email chains wherein we just keep trying to munge 
apples and oranges together. :)

-bacon