Application velocity and time-to-market considerations require organizations to build a Modern Network that can deliver any application to any user anywhere over any infrastructure or connection. The network needs to be self-driven to deliver agility. Applications and data are delivered across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. On a practical level, this means that the Modern Network needs the ability to support any combination of bare-metal, virtual machines, containers, IaaS and serverless infrastructure. Organizations need to deliver public cloud scalability and simplicity over private or hybrid cloud environments with autoscaling flexibility to protect the application experience while optimizing cost. Security policies should scale with capacity, and networks should be able to port over to other infrastructures seamlessly for business continuity. These capabilities enable Networking as Code—a complete network stack that is automated and self-healing with consistent policy and cloud management, cloud elasticity, and scale.

Physical network infrastructure in the Modern Network is generic. It’s built using general–purpose hardware whose sole purpose is to move bits fast and efficiently in support of the user journey and application experience. Physical infrastructure can sit anywhere—in the data center, in the branch, in the cloud or on the edge in 5G, IoT and service providers networks. It needs to be empowered by a software-centric policy and network management model. Organizations should be able to add or subtract any hardware from the environment easily and seamlessly and further enhance flexibility, performance and security with SmartNICs and bare-metal options.