SD-WAN may be the key to smart network services
If you stop and think, a lot of our expectations about network services are really about personality—our own. We’d like our services to work, well, the way we work. We’d like them to know us, to tune to our needs, right? Do you think that some giant global interconnect with hundreds of thousands of elements is going to be able to do that? Nope, which means personalized services will have to come down to the only piece we really own—the lowly network edge.
We learned decades ago that you can’t make giant networks user- or service-aware. Awareness of this sort, which is known as “statefulness” in network-speak, means sticking little pieces of a virtual-you into the network to represent your interests. Maybe these pieces are an entry in a routing table, or maybe they’re a policy stored in some repository and sent to the devices that handle your traffic, but they’re individualized if what they’re doing is to personalize. That just doesn’t scale. Not only are there too many little pieces, network traffic could get reconfigured or a device could fail, and all at once your personalizing pieces aren’t even where your traffic is going.