If you asked a network engineer to define “the network” back in 2016, they’d answer with confidence. Back then, the network was simply the boxes and circuits that connected monolithic applications, including switches, routers, firewalls and MPLS circuits. Skip forward to 2021, and the answer wasn’t so simple. Many enterprises were using service meshes to support containerized applications, and the definition of the network expanded to include service discovery, sidecars and application-layer policies. Today, as enterprises deploy distributed AI infrastructure spanning agents, models, data sources, and tools across different locations and environments, the definition of the network is evolving once again….

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