Deja vu:  As went networking, now goes cloud.. »

Some people thought it was unusual for a bunch of networking guys to start a company that wants to simplify the cloud services governance world.    But we see parallels all the time between the evolution of networking technologies and web services (SOA, APIs, Cloud services, or whatever you want to call them).

One parallel -  constantly shrinking 'islands of complexity' .    When IP started happening in the network world, there were many complex technologies like SNA, IPX, CLNS, etc.   First IP was used as a much simpler way to connect these 'islands of complexity' because there were such high barriers to making the complex technologies work together.   Over time, the islands got smaller and smaller until it was just IP.

And now here we are in the services world -  SOA, WS-*, ESB/middleware - all this enterprise complexity being connected together aross domains -  by simpler and simpler standards such as REST and technologies from the consumer world.   LIght weight service infrastructure (or call it Cloud or API infrastructure) will be used to connect these islands of complexity until the islands shrink away - and simpler APIs for app2app communication become the de facto standard.

-Ravi is a co-founder and VP Engineering of Sonoa.  Ravi developed the BGP protocol and Cisco Express Forwarding in Cisco and while in Redback architected and led the development of the SmartEdge Service Gateway, a Subscriber Management and Edge Routing platform.