The GLIF meeting will present recent developments in global light paths, but also discuss the issues around networks being increasingly software driven. Software systems and software development are becoming as important as network engineering, and (N)RENs traditionally have limited experience in developing and testing production code. Similarly, more services are moving into the cloud, and whilst this hides the complexity from users, it makes managing networks more complex and will require more sophisticated measurement and monitoring. More generally, many (N)RENs cannot continue to justify higher bandwidth networks on a handful of big data research projects alone, and need to ensure good access to compute and storage clusters for the smaller research projects too.
