Hello Ravi,
Great article. With full disclosure on my limited expertise in DC\V and SD(X=DC, Nw,Storage), let me add that this has been the best reading on the topic of network abstraction as it applies to DevOps. I really look forward to additional entries on SDN.

To attest with my own humble experience(s) - wish this was available many years ago while i was in SQA. I had to spin off servers and customize client-server configs to test multiple workloads, upgrade paths, firmware versions etc. Everything related to touching the network had to go through tickets…If the concept of ANP had been available - i can assess that a whole month of QA, dev, IT ops & PM efforts could be reduced to mere days…

Quite a bit of agile IT\Shadow IT offshoots we see in client environments is just to enable this speed of execution between dev - QA - ops - PMs; i am hopeful efforts by industry thought leaders including Cisco leads to simplify IT ops in the above context.
thx for the detailed blog,
Balaji