The Tale of Application Aware Networking

 

Almost a decade ago some Networking Industry vendor/people threw this idea of the holy " Application Aware Networking/Infrastructure " thingy and still today it seems of a popular school of thoughts among Network Engineers that follow the Flat Earth Theory.

What they often miss though is:

1. Business runs on top of business platforms, business processes and services as opposed to contrary belief on Applications.

2. Applications comes in different forms, shapes and Architectural choices - SOA, Microservices, Centralized, Distributed etc.

3. If you keep track of Applications or meta data, You must keep and maintain their state which means resources and state sync

4. You as networking engineer have never been taught about how to gather Application requirements

5. Your favorite OEM/Vendor doesn't provider you with any of good tools, procedures and methods to capture any of above information effectively.

6. Do you speak the language that Business folks understand ?

HTH...

A Network Artist 🎨