Software Defined...anything?

Hi all,

I'm currently at the IG16 conference in Leeds, the title of which is "Software Defined...So what?". So what indeed?


A small part of the time in the talks today has been to define "Software Defined". Reading between the lines, it has almost nothing to do with "Software" defining anything and everything to do with automation and API's.

Let me go back a bit and I'll try to explain why you don't have to worry about "Software Defined...something" and why you have actually been doing this stuff for years.

SDx, the TLA being bandied around here with great abandon, is the act of abstracting the user from the API of a given vendor or set of vendors and giving them a core API that translates ubiquitous commands into Vendor specific commands.

Wow. What a sentence.

Ok. You are a Sys Admin. You have some Dell storage units and some Netapp storage units. You also have access to the API's and some skill in scripting. Now, some monster has asked you to create the same LUNs and configs on both units. So you write a script that will do that by speaking to the 2 companies API's that talks to their kit. Congratulations, you are now doing SDS.

Happy enough so far? Well it gets more interesting.

Lets say you don't actually care about storage configuration automation. You very rarely set up a new LUN, disk array, whatever. However, you've only got block storage (fibre/iscsi) and you want to automate the process of end users getting SMB or NFS shares. What you do is put a server inbetween, write some scripts that create windows/nfs shares on demand through a webpage or whatever and boom. Software Defined Storage at this layer too.

It's exactly the same deal with networking. If you write a script that interacts with some Cisco switches and/or some other kit, that is Software Defined Networking.

I raised a point in the Q&A session that this description is wrong. It isn't "Software Defined X". It's "Profile Defined X". Let's take Storage. What the SDS (Software Defined Storage) layer is actually doing is being your swiss army storage dude. It knows how to speak to all storage API's. You give the SDS a profile for it to follow, a device to poke the profile into and it'll do it configuration for you.

None of this is new. People have been writing scripts to do this for years. The only difference is now companies are getting into it and selling purpose built devices with a profile manager and a Perl script (or similar) to run against the Vendors API's.

The bonus is that because BIG IT are coming round to the idea they can monetise it. As they are trying harder to monetise it we are about to see some API standards being brought in. This means, ironically, it'll be easier for you to write code for the Vendors API's and not need their devices in the first place.

Software Defined X, again, isn't new. However the market is driving a new appproach to it. We need to be receptive to it, and actively encourage it so we can move onto more cool things. But don't forget, as it's as simple as all this, all you need is a computer and an API and you can do Software Defined anything you like.

I'm off to write a Software Defined Coffee API. Makes about as much sense as everything else.

thanks for reading,