Adding an API to networking hardware doesn’t solve management challenges

Network management remains a significant challenge despite the incorporation of cloud-inspired technologies. Larry and the author have penned a book on Edge Cloud Operations to address this issue, as operations frequently go unaddressed during traditional network education. The author's career transition from Cisco, a classic networking vendor, to Nicira, an SDN startup, underscores the disparity between cloud and traditional network operators' management practices.

One of the hurdles the author faced at Cisco was the lack of consistency in device features, which makes it difficult to develop and maintain a unified network management system. The author's attempt to introduce a programmatic API to configure router features was unsuccessful because customers expected every feature to be accessible via the command-line interface (CLI), creating an additional obstacle for product teams.

The author's realization that simply adding an API to a device is insufficient for network management led him to advocate for better abstractions, such as centralized controllers that oversee a network of distributed forwarding devices. This approach, as demonstrated by Nicira's solution, can simplify network management by treating networks as software entities rather than just collections of devices.