Redefining Software Defined Anything

Hi all,

Last night at the IG16 dinner I did the social thing and asked other people what they thought of the whole SDx thing. Apparently my comment in the Q&A session had hit home with quite a few of the more technical spods and this got us talking about what we would actually describe as "Software Defined".

Fishcake: Quite nice.

First we went over the current definition of what Software Defined is and what we thought was broken with that name. Apparently my opinion was quite well received and we came to a group decision that SDx in it's current framing is actually "Profile Defined". Humans define the Profile. The Profile is pushed to a controller of some kind. The Controller pushes the Profile to the end devices.

Lamb: Really good. Succulent. Great with the ju.

What is an API anyway? Does SDx need to be API driven? We quickly came to the conclusion that the API in all the slides didn't actually have to be an API. It just has to be a method of collecting data or sending new commands. This could be as simple as WMI calls or an SSH session. As long as the controller knows what to do, and it produces an automated response it could even be as simple as dropping a file into a remote directory.

Creme Brulee: Really? Was nice but these things pop up everywhere. This one had fruit.

What should SDx be? We decided that the real innovation in SDx wasn't actually the controllers or the code or the software. The actual innovation here are Vendors providing programmatic ways of configuring devices remotely. The software element in SDx is just replacing the human pressing the buttons. But that's not what SDx should be.

We decided that in order for SDx to be a real thing it needed to do more. It needed to do more than just blindly push human written profiles to devices. It needed to do more than the devices themselves. It needs to become the central hub for the environment. It needs to react to that environment based on how the environment is behaving at the time and it needs to do this automagically. The profiles then are humans telling the controller the acceptable ranges the environment can be in and the controller makes the decisions on how that is achieved. This would be a true Software Defined environment.

Cheese: Cheese.

So what next? Well as our new definition of SDx is more automated and less human controlled it brought into the discussion of other technologies. If SDx could re-route network traffic or turn off switches to save power, for example, would we need Cisco's very clever routing protocol to find "cheaper" routes? Would we need VMWares Storage virtualisation or DRS? Were all of these things work arounds in preparation for SDx and if SDx is better, how do we wind down these technologies?

Thanks for reading,