According to RFC1925, the second fundamental truth of networking is: No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can’t increase the speed of light.

According to RFC1925, the first fundamental truth of networking is: it has to work. While this might seem to be overly simplistic, it has proven—over the years—to be much more difficult to implement in real life than it looks like in a slide deck. Those with extensive experience with failures, however, can often make a better guess at what is possible to make work than those without such experience. The good news, however, is the experience of failure can be shared, especially through self-deprecating humor.

sarcasm warning—take the following post with a large grain of salt

A thousand years from now, when someone is writing the history of computer networks, one thing they should notice is how we tend to reduce our language so as many terms as possible have precisely the same meaning. They might attribute this to marketing, or the hype cycle, but whatever the cause this is clearly a trend in the networking world. Some examples might be helpful, so … forthwith, the reduced terminology of the networking world.

Software Defined Networking (SDN): Used to mean a standardized set of interfaces that enabled open access to the forwarding hardware. Came to mean some form of control plane centralization over time. Now means automated configuration and management of network devices, centralized control planes, traffic engineering, and just about everything else.

Fabric: Used to mean a regular, non-planar, repeating network topology with scale-out characteristics. Now means any vaguely hierarchical topology that is not a ring.