this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Software defined wan (SDWAN) is the industry term for bundling multiple independent internet connections to maximise bandwidth.
SD-WAN includes that but it is not its sole purpose, although I agree most vendors will say that's what you want. WAN/Link Aggregation, Multilink Aggregation, Link Load Balancing, Equal Cost Multipath, WAN Virtualisation, etc are ways to bundle multiple links together.
In WIFI terms, it's called channel bonding, it was proprietary and various vendors had their own implementations, see "Super G".
I agree but most of the wan optimisers have rebranded to SDWAN because that was the hype about 7 years ago.
With wifi specifically yea, trying to multiplex a technology that is effectively a CSMA/CA is hard and there is no interoperability.
Can you explain what this "software defined x" means that you hear everywhere?
Basically it means to not have a special designed hardware for task X but to do much of it in software which gives you more flexibility. And also let's you configure and use X a bit more flexible.
E.g. software defined networking: If you run several virtual machines on a server, you may define the whole network between them virtually in software instead of doing it on the hardware side. Sure, you still need an ethernet card in your server to connect it to other servers and the internet, but all load balancing, switches, firewalls, VLANs, etc. between the virtual machines (or containers) on your server are virtualized in software - or maybe eben between servers.
Same goes for e.g. Software Defined Radio. In the early days you had dedicated hardware to control the mobile network and the antennas and such. Today you "just" have the antenna and a transceiver that is capable of producing and receiving a wide range of signals and modulations. All encoding, decoding and interpretation the signals is done in software. If your hardware is capable enough, the upgrade from e.g. 4G to 5G may only be a software update for all base stations.
But what about for services other than X, like Facebook or YouTube?
/j
These are all software defined social networking, aren't they?
I was just joking about the placeholder X being X (formerly Twitter)
The main ones I hear are software defined WAN. Which means you can do per application internet steering.
Software defined LAN is more about authorising specific applications to access the corporate lan.