Interesting article, but it contains some weird statements. >It is literally and has always been the software-defined network you use for interconnecting netwo

Interesting article, but it contains some weird statements. >It is literally and has always been the software-defined network you use for interconnecting networks that have gotten too big. But the problem is, it was always too hard to hardware accelerate, and anyway, it didn't get hardware accelerated, and configuring DHCP really is a huge pain, so network operators just learned how to bridge bigger and bigger things. IP forwarding (longest prefix match) is more complicated than mac forwarding yes, but it has been done in hardware (ASICs, typically NPUs today) for a long time now. Operators (I assume ISPs) do not build large bridged networks as they need their networks to scale as they grow, or they will hit a breaking point where their network collapses. ISP's typically use centralised DHCP servers (as opposed to configuring their access routers) and configure their routers to use DHCP relay. DHCP server configuration is easily automated by just reading your IPAM data, it's a non-issue.