Even with a holiday in the way, the week had plenty to talk about on the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) fronts.

AT&T's Domain 2.0 program could be a problem for Cisco, as analyst Mike Genovese of MKM Partners pointed out in a report this week (and as we briefly mentioned Thursday).

Part of the point behind Domain 2.0, which breaks AT&T's practice of sticking to two "domain suppliers" for each major tech category, is to increase AT&T's use of off-the-shelf hardware, and Cisco's Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) — the stuff introduced with Insieme's launch in November — is anything but, as Light Reading points out.

Vendors with a better chance to profit from Domain 2.0 include Ciena, F5, and Finisar, Genovese wrote. (VMware too, in all, likelihood, but Genovese doesn't cover that company.) In general, AT&T has expressed a strong interest in NFV and white-box switching, and it's going to be interesting to see whether the big carrier can pull off such a radical shift.

FireEye announced Thursday that it's acquired Mandiant, the cyber forensics company that, in February, became famous for saying it had linked the People's Liberation Army to U.S.-targeted hacking attacks coming out of Asia. (We should note that China officially denied the allegations.)

The deal, worth about $1 billion, was announced Thursday afternoon. Mandiant's revenues top $100 million per year, FireEye's CEO told the press.

Blogger Jason Edelman posted a good list of equipment vendors' announced SDN plans and each one's implications regarding SDN controllers. Here's an interesting side note he put in the Cisco entry: "Word is the Nexus 9000 will even offer access to the Broadcom shell as well." I don't fully know what that means, but it sounds like it might overlap what's being planned at Centec (a chip company open-sourcing a switch-chip software development kit) or Pluribus (equipment vendor that developed its own software for Broadcom's switch chips).

Juniper announced Cyberport, a government-owned Hong Kong community built to house tech startups, as a customer for the Contrail SDN platform. Cyberport plans to use Contrail to provide network-as-a-service connectivity, available through a self-service portal. The deployment also includes one Juniper Networks MX80 3D edge router. (Hey, no one said Cyberport was a large community.) Interestingly, the press release goes out of its way to note that the use of Contrail and OpenStack is a way for Cyberport to avoid vendor lock-in, as both can work with multiple vendors' physical networks.

... China Telecom and PCCW are among the Asian companies that have now joined the Open Networking Foundation, according to Dan Pitt's Asia tour diary.

... Amazon Web Services is on track to be a $9 billion-a-year business in 2015, CTO Werner Vogels tells GigaOm.