Matt Oswalt of Keeping It Classless writes:

Most of my readers would  consider themselves network engineers — folks that live and breathe networking and everything that’s required to build them. Folks like you and I don’t really need to hear what’s wrong with networking, as we live it every day. However, for the sake of others that may be reading, let me provide a little context here.

Nearly everyone in the industry is hearing about how “networking is slow” with respect to provisioning time. We hear about how virtual machines can be instantiated in a few seconds (hell, application containers can be spun up in less than a second!) yet the really important network stuff like firewall or load balancer policies take forever. They’re not wrong — networking has never really been tightly coupled with compute and storage policies, and much if not all network provisioning processes in the average IT shop is performed  manually.

Read more: The Evolution of Network Programmability