questions asked during network engineer interview

Tue Jul 21 20:56:11 UTC 2020

Nick,

SDN works very well even for tiny networks. Look at Ubiquiti’s SDN controller. Yes, it requires proprietary hardware (proving SDN isn’t only for commodity hardware). But it can scale a network of a single switch up to hundreds of switches with a single point of configuration. You want a new VLAN across the entire network? It’s a couple clicks. Want to deploy an new SSID in one department? A few more clicks. It’s very well designed for small- and mid-sized networks. 

Bigger networks use other products. But there is an SDN solution off-the-shelf today for every size. 

-mel via cell

> On Jul 21, 2020, at 1:22 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick at foobar.org> wrote:
> 
> William Herrin wrote on 21/07/2020 20:21:
>> This is happening a lot in the big shops like Amazon that can afford
>> to employ software developers to write purpose-built network code.
> 
> IOW, it works if you have a large and homogeneous enough network with a sufficiently narrowly product portfolio that you can justify the cost of getting enough programming skill to make the cost/benefit ratio work.
> 
> Some networks are like this; many aren't.
> 
> In fairness, most networks would benefit from some degree of automation.
> 
> Nick
> 