Reminds me of this video from the Cisco TechWise Fundamental series: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l75B6D9xyMQL (“Fundamentals of Software-Defined Networking”)

That’s obviously not a hardware development, but I feel like the motivation may be similar: make components more modular; stabilize, standardize and align their interfaces.

By making these components “plug and play” the distance between a logical flow chart and the actual implementation is somewhat reduced, making the development of custom components more efficient and agile.