Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831523

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

I remember working on related projects about ten years ago in grad school, and even back then it felt like a somewhat naive and overhyped form of “engineering innovation.”

Take OpenFlow, for example — every TCP connection had to go through the controller to set up a per-connection flow match entry for the path. It always struck me as a bit absurd.

At the time, the main push came from Stanford’s “clean slate” networking project led by Prof. Nick McKeown. They spun off things like Open vSwitch, Big Switch Networks, and even open-source router efforts like NetFPGA. Later, the professor went back into industry.

Looking back, the whole movement feels like a startup-driven experiment that got heavily “packaged” but never really solved any fundamental problem. I mean, traditional distributed-routing-based network gear was already working fine — didn’t they already have admin interfaces for configuration anyway (or call that admin interface SDN )? lol ~