questions asked during network engineer interview

Tue Jul 21 19:21:11 UTC 2020

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 9:57 PM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.com> wrote:
> Suffice it to say, to this day, we still don't know what SDN means to
> us, hehe.

Hi Mark,

The Software Defined Network concept started as, "Let's use commodity
hardware running commodity operating systems to form the control plane
for our network devices." The concept has expanded somewhat to: "Lets
use commodity hardware running commodity operating systems AS our
network devices." For example, if you build a high-rate firewall with
DPDK on Linux, that's now considered SDN since its commodity hardware,
commodity OS and custom packet handling (DPDK) that skips the OS.

This is happening a lot in the big shops like Amazon that can afford
to employ software developers to write purpose-built network code.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin
bill at herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/