Matt Oswalt of Keeping It Classless comments:
I’d like to briefly express a sentiment that I pondered after listening to another one of Ivan’s great podcasts, specifically regarding the true value of a software-defined network approach. The statement was made that ACLs are terrible representations of business policy. This is not inaccurate, but the fact remains that ACLs are currently the de facto representation of business policy on a network device. The “network team” gets a request from an application team to “fix the firewall”, and the policy that is applied to enable that application typically results in an ACL change.
If you’ve ever been in this situation, you likely realize this entire process probably takes some time. Either the application team doesn’t know what exactly needs to be changed, or the network team is too busy, or both. Clearly, there’s a problem. And more often than not, this discussion becomes all about the forwarding architecture.
It’s too easy to get caught up in the power of SDN. Instead, you should remember that it’s designed to help solve problems that we have with systems today.
Read more at: SDN: Integration over Manipulation
