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Vint Cerf: SDN Is a Model For a Better Internet

Posted by Soulskill on from the safer-than-relying-on-pigoens dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Vint Cerf, one of the 'founders of the Internet,' told an audience April 16 that if he could do it all over again, he would construct the Internet in the mold of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP protocol suite with Bob Kahn, said that he admired how SDN separates the data plane from the control plane, which allows the network to be controlled via software from an external server. One of the hazards of conjoining the two, he added, was the attack risk. 'I wish we had done [the separation] in the Internet design, but we didn't,' Cerf told the audience for his keynote address at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. 'In a very interesting way you have an opportunity to reinvent this whole notion of networking.'"

2 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Great inventors invent by chance by loufoque · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's funny how great inventions were invented by chance. If the supposedly "great" inventors would re-do it today, they'd do it wrong and ruin it.
    We attach too much credit to the people. It is the situation which led to the invention.

  2. Me too, and I was around back then by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Putting the smarts in the network means cable tv and POTS.

    More like cellular. At least on POTS the telco doesn't do anything with what you're sending.

    The internet would be nothing more than the home shopping channel had they gone that route.

    Yes. And those of us who were there at the beginning were against that. Centralized "software defined networks" already existed. Tymnet, Telenet, and X.25 were all centrally controlled, along with Prestel (UK), Minitel (France), and Qube (Columbus, Ohio). We knew what that world looked like, and rejected it.

    The model for "software defined networking" is that users talk mostly to a limited number of sites (Google, Facebook, Youtube, Comcast, etc.) In that model, the service provider would like to control where their users connect to the many locations of the service. Google previously was pushing for a non-cached non-anonymous DNS system, so that the identity of the user determined where a DNS reference resolved. Nobody liked that much.