If you decide to change the way your network operates, he says, there are cases where you have no choice but to physically rearrange your hardware.

The trouble is that networking gear is still stuck in the computing dark ages. We can program our desktop computers and our smartphones and our servers, creating all sorts of new software that does almost whatever we want it to do, but there’s no App Store for networking switches and routers.

And that’s no small problem. These are the machines that tie everything together inside the mammoth data centers that drive the internet and the world’s big businesses.