I don’t understand networking all that well. Is it interesting that the telcos and non-tech companies are moving away from specialized hardware toward software defined networks while the hyperscalers are using hardware acceleration?
It's possible for different vendors to be on different points on the wheel of reincarnation at the same time. https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm
E.g. instead of your little server setting firewall rules locally, it tells the router what traffic to allow. That router, in turn, tells upstream about its needs, and so on. Or a server reports its load, and the routers do active load balancing. The hardware wires are still there, as always.
Re. hardware acceleration, I think the earliest form of this was moving the checksum computation [1] from the CPU to the network device, even though the networking device didn't really know about the protocol it was doing the checksum for.
In both, it's just about parallelizing workloads, the same we do with microservices at the upper levels of the stack. Natural progression of distributed systems, with fancy names attached.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#...
It's just not realistic to take all the switches, routers, and other garbage you've got in between points in the network off the rack/ceiling/wall/pole because the hardware can't support some protocol.
Good evidence for this is the rollout of fiber, which has been happening neighborhood by neighborhood and house by house for a decade.
Their SDN implementations are also hardware accelerated.