Thomas Magill

I was recently asked by a colleague to build a portal to allow engineers to start and stop two Amazon EC2 instances that host software used for network discovery and mapping. The intent was to only have them running when necessary to reduce the cost of instances running when they are not in use.  Jokingly, I asked if he wanted me to build this portal on an EC2 instance. He didn’t catch the joke, so I explained that running one full-time instance to control two other instances was probably not going to be very effective at saving money.

There are a lot of new terms these days around data center networking. Software-defined-this and that-as-a-service are among the leaders. Neither of these are new concepts in technology, but emphasize a new way of looking at how data centers work. Networks have already been “software-defined” and virtualized for an incredibly long time, but now the emphasis is on abstracting the intent from the configuration and treating the entire network as a system. Cisco’s entry into software-defined networking (SDN) is its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). ACI has a lot of new concepts and terminology, especially around the abstraction mentioned earlier, but that will not be our current focus.