Chapter 1. The Motivations for a New Network Architecture
Once upon a time, there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell.
Charles de Lint
If applications had never changed, there’d be some other story to tell than the one you hold in your hands. A distributed application is in a dance with the network, with the application leading. The story of the modern data center network begins when the network was caught flat-footed when the application began the dance to a different tune. Understanding this transition helps in more ways than just learning why a change is necessary. I often encounter customers who want to build a modern network but cling to old ways of thinking. Application developers coming in from the enterprise side also tend to think in ways that are anathema to the modern data center.
This chapter will help you answer questions such as:
What are the characteristics of the new applications?
What is an access-aggregation-core network?
In what ways did access-aggregation-core networks fail these applications?
The Application-Network Shuffle
Figure 1-1 shows how applications have evolved from single
monoliths to the highly distributed microservices
model. With each successive evolution, the requirements from the
networks have also evolved.
Figure 1-1. The evolution of application architecture
In the era of single monolithic ...
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