"Firewalls are just some stupid crap industry made up and went with." -- I can't even begin to unravel how short sighted that comment actually is.

I'm not sure you really understand the state of the firewall industry at this point in time if I'm allowed to be blunt. While I do think that traditional firewalling (L3/L4) has lost it's overall efficacy there are solutions on the market that address application control, identity, A/V, IPS, spyware and malware solutions in a single solution (not UTM) and that are stream based (single pass - again not UTM).

Firewalls at the enterprise level are FULLY required for business to operate in a relatively secure manner today. Controlling the applications ingress and egress is not an option - it's a requirement. Greg (Etherealmind) has been very well known to be, well, a bit opportunistic in his early assessments. He mentions NSX in the East/West flows in the SDN environments, however what he fails to mention is that many customers implementing NSX have also been implementing purposebuilt firewalls in NSX via the exposed placement of security services tied to the NSX and NetX APIs (http://www.networkworld.com/article/2169448/virtualization/v...).

Working for a security company in this space let's refute the majority of his numbered components..

1) The majority of the customer verticals I deal with buying 10Gb+ firewalls buy A LOT of them. These are environments doing millions to, literally, billions of dollars of revenue per hour. A completely licensed, supported firewall rated at, say 20Gb can be had for under $300k and maintained annually for less.

2) 6.7 nanoseconds is a myth - unless you're in financials and the HPC space. There are so many conga line security products today, and ill conceived network architectures and a thousand other things where 6.7 nanosecond expectation is a unicorn. We typically get to the microsecond levels and customers (even financials) are often fine with those numbers in critical environments.

3) Yes you can. There are a lot of customers using NSX and OpenStack using fully supported, fully modern security solutions in production today. I've been involved in said projects - the best part about those environments is it's actually easier to deploy because it's software and more and more platforms have fully exposed APIs and are built for automation and abstraction.

4) BS. Application security? For real? Most of the Global 2000 are NOT software companies. That means they're software development is not their forte. Which means that most will continue to have SQLi (and other trivial) problems well into the next decade.

5) Let's just say for a minute that the perimeter is collapsed - which I hope that at this point it is for the majority of organizations who take network security seriously. That doesn't change the fact that overlays can't have security insertion points and that there can't be microsegmentation. Because there already is today.

6, 7 and 8... They make the least sense of any of the arguments because they are so pointed and least relevant to all scenarios.

Sure - fixing the endpoint and the software involved is an awesome approach to security. But traditional firewalls never fixed that in the first place, all they controlled was access. However today's firewalls go well beyond that and provide much more granular application and user control as well as threat services on top to boot.

But I'm sorry - if firewalls provided no business value there would not be companies building and selling 10 & 100Gb firewalls for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to protect, segment, identify and inspect - well beyond what this is lumping all "firewalls" into.