[irq]: techie interrupted

The point here isn’t to blow a standards dodger whistle, but rather to observe that, perhaps, a significant shift is underway when it comes to the relevance and role of “protocols” in building next generation virtual data center networks. Yes, we will always need protocols to define the underlying link level and data path properties of the physical network — and those haven’t changed much and are pretty well understood today.

However, with the possibility of open source software facilitating the data path not only in hypervisor virtual switches, but many other network devices, what then will be the role of the “protocol”? And what role will a standards body have in such case when the pace of software development far exceeds that of protocol standardization.