You have spent years managing networks built around servers that look roughly the same. A 1U or 2U chassis. Two CPUs. Some RAM. A handful of drives. One or two NICs running at 10GbE or 25GbE. The NIC is an afterthought -- a commodity part you order in bulk and never think about again.
The switch it connects to is familiar too. You understand spanning tree, ECMP, QoS queues. You can troubleshoot a flapping link without looking at the documentation.
This chapter is about how that familiar world collided with a fundamentally different problem -- and what the industry had to build from scratch to solve it.