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I don’t understand networking all that well. Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software

I don’t understand networking all that well. Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software defined networks while the hyperscalers are using hardware acceleration?

wmf 3y ago
"Software defined networks" doesn't mean anything. If you want to understand networking you have to strike it from your vocabulary. It's possible for different vendors to be on different points on the wheel of reincarnation at the same time. https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm
- smokefoot 3y ago
  Ha, I get it. That is a helpful model.
eightysixfour 3y ago
These things are partially related - telcos running things in the cloud, in software, is actually running on top of these hardware innovations, it is just abstracted from them.
dilyevsky 3y ago
Nobody wants to depend on hardware development cycle hence “fuck it, ill do it in software”
- duped 3y ago
  I don't think it's that hard to rely on hardware development, it's more of a problem of rolling out a fleet of new hardware. It's just not realistic to take all the switches, routers, and other garbage you've got in between points in the network off the rack/ceiling/wall/pole because the hardware can't support some protocol. Good evidence for this is the rollout of fiber, which has been happening neighborhood by neighborhood and house by house for a decade.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    I was mainly talking about your own dc but yes if you need to traverse public infra it’s a complete non-starter. But also it’s not like middle boxes offer you any sort of sdn api - you still need to overlay
tommiegannert 3y ago
SDN just means reconfiguring things that used to be manually configured on-the-fly. E.g. instead of your little server setting firewall rules locally, it tells the router what traffic to allow. That router, in turn, tells upstream about its needs, and so on. Or a server reports its load, and the routers do active load balancing. The hardware wires are still there, as always. Re. hardware acceleration, I think the earliest form of this was moving the checksum computation [1] from the CPU to the network device, even though the networking device didn't really know about the protocol it was doing the checksum for. In both, it's just about parallelizing workloads, the same we do with microservices at the upper levels of the stack. Natural progression of distributed systems, with fancy names attached. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#checksum_offload https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#...
caskstrength 3y ago
> Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software defined networks while the hyperscalers are using hardware acceleration? Their SDN implementations are also hardware accelerated.

wmf 3y ago

"Software defined networks" doesn't mean anything. If you want to understand networking you have to strike it from your vocabulary. It's possible for different vendors to be on different points on the wheel of reincarnation at the same time. https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm

smokefoot 3y ago
Ha, I get it. That is a helpful model.

eightysixfour 3y ago

These things are partially related - telcos running things in the cloud, in software, is actually running on top of these hardware innovations, it is just abstracted from them.

dilyevsky 3y ago

Nobody wants to depend on hardware development cycle hence “fuck it, ill do it in software”

duped 3y ago
I don't think it's that hard to rely on hardware development, it's more of a problem of rolling out a fleet of new hardware. It's just not realistic to take all the switches, routers, and other garbage you've got in between points in the network off the rack/ceiling/wall/pole because the hardware can't support some protocol. Good evidence for this is the rollout of fiber, which has been happening neighborhood by neighborhood and house by house for a decade.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  I was mainly talking about your own dc but yes if you need to traverse public infra it’s a complete non-starter. But also it’s not like middle boxes offer you any sort of sdn api - you still need to overlay

tommiegannert 3y ago

SDN just means reconfiguring things that used to be manually configured on-the-fly. E.g. instead of your little server setting firewall rules locally, it tells the router what traffic to allow. That router, in turn, tells upstream about its needs, and so on. Or a server reports its load, and the routers do active load balancing. The hardware wires are still there, as always. Re. hardware acceleration, I think the earliest form of this was moving the checksum computation [1] from the CPU to the network device, even though the networking device didn't really know about the protocol it was doing the checksum for. In both, it's just about parallelizing workloads, the same we do with microservices at the upper levels of the stack. Natural progression of distributed systems, with fancy names attached. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#checksum_offload https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#...

caskstrength 3y ago

> Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software defined networks while the hyperscalers are using hardware acceleration? Their SDN implementations are also hardware accelerated.