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This last week I was talking to someone at a small startup that intends to eliminate all the complex routing from campus networks. In the past, when reading blog posts about Kubernetes, I’ve read about how it was designed to eliminate routing protocols because “routing protocols are so complex.”
Color me skeptical.
There are two reasons for complexity in a design. The first is you’re solving a hard problem. The second is you’ve made bad design choices in the past, and you’re pasting complexity on top to solve some perceived problem (whether perceived or real).
The problem with all this talk about building something that’s “less complex” is people tend to see complexity of the first kind and think, “we can get rid of that complexity if we start over.” Failing to understand the past before building the future is a recipe for repeated failures of the same kind. Building a network without a distributed routing protocol hasn’t been tried before either, right? Well, yes, it has … We either forget how it turned out, or we say “well, that’s not the same thing I’m talking about here” (just like “real socialism hasn’t ever been tried”).
Even worse, Continue reading