There’s a funny dichotomy between the container ecosystem and the software-defined networking (SDN) one. In the container space, seemingly every vendor is creating their own lightweight operating system that is designed to work well in a containerized infrastructure. Red Hat has one, Canonical does too, Microsoft is coming to the party, CoreOS was an early entrant… and so on.
In the SDN space, however, it seems that all the competitive vendors are busy looking elsewhere to compete and are happy to agree on the best approach to an SDN-specific operating system. And that is a situation that Cumulus Networks has been quick to leverage.
Cumulus Networks is a young startup with some pretty high-brow credentials. The company is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Peter Wagner, and four of the original VMware founders. Its founding team is a who’s who from the networking world, and hence this is one company that has the feeling that nothing it does can be wrong. Perhaps that is why so many large vendors seem in awe of the company. Previously, the company has inked deals with Broadcom, Dell, HP, Quanta, Super Micro, and others. Today, on the eve of VMware’s annual VMworld conference, they are…
