The silos within IT are breaking down, at least in terms of awareness of each other and the need to coordinate provisioning and orchestration of compute, network and application services. No longer is it acceptable to simply provide a solution; that solution must integrate, collaborate and interoperate with a plethora of existing and emerging data center technologies such as SDN, cloud management platforms, and virtualization frameworks.
After all, part of the raison d’être for SDN is the need to enable the network with the agility and flexibility of its counterparts- devops and application development – necessary to improve service velocity. That goal cannot be realized by enabling just the underlay networks addressed by SDN architectures. The application service layers (4-7) must also support the programmability, dynamism, and flexibility promised by SDN guiding architectural principles.