Ahh, so this is really something else entirely, this is more SDN, Software Defined Networking as the buzzwords dub it.  MS is just putting SDN controller software on linux as hell, they need it stable, and even they know it wouldn't be that on windoze.

This is the same as SDN controller products the like of BigSwitch Floodlight, Juniper OpenContrail, VMware NSX, Cisco ACI, and the list goes on to build data center network fabrics.  Really they need a way to program switches, software or hardware, to get "flows" from one place to another.  Each and every network connection is a "flow", so imagine, these are a lot to track, especially when we're talking in some cases 320gbps paths (4-8x 40gb spine not uncommon now in dc networks, one vendor included 64-way ecmp for amazon).

Software is now (in theory) centralizing how that switching/routing is determined as people are tired of having to interlace hardware from 10 different vendors and 20 languages/dialects, across thousands of platforms and modules.  Rather than argue nuances of spanning tree or bgp between cisco, juniper, arista, and brocade, replace them with a shell script and a lobotomy.

This is Microsoft's stab at doing so, using the same approach with things like mq bus, caching, distributed quorums, etc, but now assuming control of the brains of your network hardware via OpenFlow spec api to program the hardware for said flows directly.  Things like BGP and Spanning-tree become edge protocols.  Like anyone, they want to insert $switch here, be that cisco, juniper, avaya, netgear, or huwai, whatever a) meets requirements, b) costs less, c) lasts longest, management/compatibility is always the issue, thus lobotomy becomes attractive and vendor irrelevant.

Even Cisco's SDN solution, ACI really is just existing big modular hardware switches running linux soc's, tying to linux software flow controllers, running zmq, reddis and some other things tracking flow paths and creating redundant paths for ECMP, and ultimately programming hardware with protocols like isis and lisp natively still.  The rest is just north/south apis, policy constructs, features for applying sense of everything else that occurs in a network, including security and application logic.  That's the hard part, making sense of it to users to configure.

Microsoft?  Security?  Application load balancing?  Running your networking?  What could go wrong.

-mb


On 09/18/2015 03:08 PM, Stephen Partington wrote: