How many of you work with open-source SDN and other solutions? What are your thoughts on its current and future status?

I've been trying for a while to figure out what I wanna do next in my career. Now I do pretty typical Cisco on-prem campus and datacenter stuff, but I kinda hate DNA and most Cisco products. On the other hand, I've always loved open source stuff, altho traditional that's mostly been software/applications, not for infrastructure.

On the other end, I've thought about heading towards a DevOps/SRE sorta role, but the amount of application-layer and programming involved is of moderate appeal - I don't really wanna program 75% of the time, and I don't really wanna leave networks behind me for the most part.

More and more I see jobs posted that I've not seen much of before: the open-source datacenter. Often startups or forward-looking companies are trying to implement it, often because their business model may have very specific infrastructure requirements that cloud can't accommodate well (at least not yet).

These sorts of positions seem rare, but interesting. A mix of old-fashioned on-prem, SDN, automation/programming, Linux and perhaps some cloud as well.

It sorta seems like this is maybe where I want to go...something in between a network engineering and an SRE position, with a bit of the best of both worlds as well as a design/architecture component.

I'd love to hear from anyone who does this kind of work and what you like/dislike, what your day to day is like, what your underlying hardware looks like, as well as your views on the future of it. I don't see much discussion of this in this sub lately.

Thanks