Now Is Not the Time to Standardize Northbound SDN APIs

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

• Standards are great for ensuring interoperability when the requirements are well understood.
• The requirements needed to support applications leveraging SDN are not well understood and standardization will inhibit innovation.

SDN northbound APIs don’t need standardization – at least not at the functional level where command and control semantics live.  Like others, I think SDN is far too early in its development to warrant standardization at a functional level.  SDN would benefit from a standardized architectural approach such as SOAP or REST, which describe different programmatic approaches to interconnecting services, because those are software architectures that are familiar to application developers.  In order to generate and maintain momentum for SDN innovation, there must be as few barriers to application development as possible.