Virtualization caused a major cultural shift in IT. By enabling physical assets to be better utilized, IT teams realized that they could deliver systems to their customers in a more timely manner, thereby delivering better value. This did not come easily as networking functions were also virtualized and IT Network teams needed to learn and trust that virtual network interfaces attached to virtual machines would behave in the same manner as physical network interfaces. Once this was proven to be operationally safe, virtualization took off.

Now, we have more IT teams adopting Agile processes in order to deliver products and services to market quicker. We also have teams adopting DevOps to deliver products and services to market quicker. But we have one major holdout – the Network. Why? Because the Network is the transport, the road that connects IT services together. This means that a small error in a routing…