Networking in the 2020s

We have to admit that networking is not the spearhead of rapid innovation in IT. There are good reasons for that. Networks require proven interoperability that has been usually sustained in standards that may take a long time to implement, and the blast radius of a network failure is worse than an electric power outage (no battery mode exists). Thus, networking has been resistant to changes until it has become totally necessary to support the evolution of applications running on top.

Changes in networking in the last 20 years have taken many flavors, both technological and cultural, and it has impacted the expectations in network observability. Even though this book is not about network architectures or solutions, we believe that having a 10,000-foot view of these factors will help you better understand the impact of the observability solutions around.

Technological changes

Everything depends on the perspective. If we use the 1990s as our reference...