Wired has a good article today on some of the geniuses and startups in the Virtual Networking space, and how they might “remake the internet.”
Together with Dan Dumitriu — another Amazon vet steeped in the science of massive computing systems — de Candia is one of the key engineers behind a company called Midokura. Much like the oft-discussed Silicon Valley startup Nicira, Midokura deals in virtual networks — computer networks that exist only as software.
Over the past decade, VMware, Microsoft, and others have helped move the world’s computing applications onto virtual servers — machines that exist only as software — and now, a new of wave of companies is fashioning software for building complex virtual networks that tie all those virtual servers together. That’s a hard concept to grasp, but basically, these companies are moving the brains of the network out of hardware and into software.