Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are quickly finding their way into everyday life – whether it's traffic data for Waze maps, sensor data from self-driving cars, or Netflix entertainment recommendations. All of these apps generate extreme volumes of data that must be collected and processed in real time. Networks built as recently as 10 years ago weren't required to collect, route, and process this vast amount of data at real-time speeds. Typical networks contained a web of hardware and cabling, a one-size-fits-all offering of bandwidth and throughput that was far too cumbersome to handle today's AI and machine learning applications. Not surprisingly, modern networking is based on a very different design.