Picking right abstrations for your Network Virtualisation solution

Intro

In my travels around the internets, I got increasingly frustrated by the fact that most descriptions of SDN and network virtualisation solutions dive right down into the specifics of how stuff works. While I’m all for the details, I feel that there is an opportunity here to step back a bit and talk about the abstractions, which is what the end-user will see and deal with. For this post, (and yes, by association) I will talk about the abstractions used by perhaps the most mature network virtualisation solution on the market today.

And yes, this means that I won’t be talking about how that stuff works. I promise. 🙂

Update 4 Aug: Post lightly edited for clarity based on great input from T. Sridhar – Thank You!

I think the leopard needs a new pair of shorts

VMware appears to be pushing hard into the utility compute space. It is easy to understand – there seems to be lot of peer pressure, both from Amazon and from OpenStack / CloudStack communities.

I don’t doubt they can make it work, but the question in my mind is “is that the best way of doing it?”.