And yet fortune 100 and 500 companies are increasingly adopting cloud technology. And there are plenty of solutions already available to distribute your cloud infra to multiple providers at once.
I think the writing's on the wall. Software devs are coding Ops out of a job. Even the network is software now.
Only at Facebook, probably one of the few companies in the world which can afford dedicated engineers for that stuff (and probably needs SDN because a server might shift totally in its roles and thus its networking dozens of times a day).
The rest of the world keeps using Cisco or HP gear, which works fine enough for everything I have seen (from SOHO equipment in small offices over 6-or-so-HE switches in a medium company to rack-sized switches at a municipal government). Also, the amount of HP or Cisco certified network engineers outweighs the amount of SDN by far.
It's definitely more than just Facebook. Every major network equipment vendor already provides SDNs, including Cisco, and HP, who has an entire site and app store dedicated to SDN.
2016: Top 10 SDN market leaders: "market is set to top $12.5 billion by 2020" ... "SDN in the data center and enterprise LAN is going to go mainstream in late 2016, early 2017," ... "We're seeing significant customer deployment. Cisco's got over 1,000 deployed customers for their SDN solution. VMware is around the same number, even though revenue might be higher on the VMware side. NEC has over 250 scaled deployment customers."
Just as an example, Cisco's been running Linux on its new gear for years. They can run multiple OSes in different planes on their custom gear and get crazy fast traffic flows while doing things like deep packet inspection. They wrote custom interfaces to do things like get super-low-latency traffic control.
You can make your own Python apps, and run them when triggered by an event, on the appliance or remotely, with several APIs. You can use Ansible, Puppet and Chef to manage the appliance configuration. You can also configure them with netconf, or XMPP. You can have your switches send you instant messages or post in your ops chatrooms. And you can deploy all your devices from a clean slate using kickstart scripts.
I think the writing's on the wall. Software devs are coding Ops out of a job. Even the network is software now.