There has been more and more talk about something called SmartNICs. Development originally started with AWS as an internal project for their cloud, simplifying their network operations and making the physical network devices simpler, dumber, and easier to manage. To me, this evolution is the next step in the networking layer.

The reason why is simple. For the last few years, the industry is moving away from complicated configurations in individual network devices, to simpler configurations in centrally managed controllers. Abstracting away complexity while we scale, is key there. By moving the network configuration to the server NICs, instead of … Read more