While software-defined networking (SDN) seems to be still stuck in the hype cycle, use cases from service providers and a few enterprises were on display at the Open Networking Summit last week. And now more could be on the way, this time from businesses operating at webscale: Facebook and Amazon.
According to a job description posted on the careers section of Facebook, the social-networking company looks like it wants to deploy software-defined networks at production scale. The right person for the open software-engineer job will head up efforts around “designing and implementing control plane systems for our network.” The job “may involve evaluating third party and open source software,” among other possible tasks. That could mean Facebook wants to explore existing proprietary controllers and other software components from vendors such as Big Switch, alongside the code that will emerge from the OpenDaylight Project vendor-led consortium.
The Facebook SDN hire suggests that Facebook is now ready to go beyond early-stage work that Facebook was doing at the beginning of the year and apparently was engaged in as early as March 2011.
As for Amazon, the retailer and Amazon Web Services operator posted earlier this month openings for an “SDN Software Development Engineer” and a “Systems Engineer” focused on “EC2 High Performance Network Virtualization.”
Amazon has a couple of ideas up its sleeve, judging by the job descriptions. First, it wants to improve the performance of its virtualized networks, to make them perform as well as networks running on bare metal. Then, Amazon wants to make multiple SDN features available to AWS customers. And because AWS is so popular and continues to grow, that could have some neat implications for customers interested in making their bandwidth as scalable as their compute and storage resources.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, and a Facebook spokesman was not able to provide any additional detail. But Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering, will be talking at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 19, and maybe then we’ll hear more information.
If the new Facebook and Amazon SDN hires move quickly, next year’s Open Networking Summit could be filled with some of the biggest use cases yet. Even so, wide-scale use of SDN among enterprises might come later next year, if not in 2015.
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