| | AUGUST 20218CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONEVOLVING DATA CENTER NETWORK FROM CLOUD-READY TO CLOUD-NATIVEBy Parantap Lahiri, VP, Network and Datacenter Engineering at eBayMonolithic applications running on dedicated servers have evolved into cloud-native microservices that freely scale on the cloud. However, in the enterprise space, more often than not, `networking' has acted as a necessary evil that slows down progress and results in unplanned outages. Interestingly enough, networks can quickly become an asset from liability if used properly. Let's take a deeper look.Networking in the enterprise domain grew up to provide connectivity between office buildings and provide access to the Internet and corporate services within data centers. Since many enterprise applications came as third party software, physical networks had to facilitate and enforce segmentation and security needs. The networks were complex, inconsistent, and fragile, with heavy dependence on a set of in-house support staff as well as dedicated engineers from vendors.Other than configuration inconsistency and failures due to lack of change rigor, the primary factor that contributed to this fragility was the inherent weakness of protocols like "spanning-tree" that were used to ensure a loop-free forwarding path for switching domains. Layer 2 switching domains were needed to support VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network), which has been an integral part of most enterprise networks to ensure IP mobility, enforcing firewalls as the default gateways, etc. These domains frequently suffered from broadcast storms that melted the networks due to loop creation. More so, loop-free requirements created topologies that resulted in congestion.Fast-forwarding a little, when companies went into delivering online services, many of the same enterprise networks were used to host services. For online services that are expected to be available for at least 99.99% of the time, these enterprise network designs have been a fundamental misfit.Now, to take this discussion one level deeper, let's analyze the impact of a typical enterprise network on cloud-ready workloads first and then on cloud-native workloads. Broadly speaking, cloud-ready workloads are monolithic applications that are packed into a virtual machine (VMs) as opposed to the original bare metal servers. In environments with a strong dependency on their incumbent physical network, such cloud-ready VMs have simply
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