In reply to tony redgrove.

Thanks Tony.

Yes, it's early days yet and we're only really seeing the capability to abstract configuration away becoming available today. But I genuinely feel that creating a network where configuration of devices themselves is arbitrary, and where a centralised policy becomes a way of defining the end-to-end network behaviour is the way forward.

Overlay networks (see SD-Access, Viptela, ACI) give us that abstracted view and allow us to orchestrate the behaviour of the whole network from one point through APIs.