What is Software Defined Networking?

Software defined networking is a utility which came to fruition after several bright engineers came to the notion that scalability with traditional networking is very expensive when upgrading and maintaining to keep up with consumer demand.

What makes this technology great for an I.T. administrator is that it provides only one centralized area for monitoring and making adjustments to traffic flow (data plane/southbound) and network configurations (control plane/northbound) separately through an application programming interface (API).

Some administrators likes to separate them as three separate layers where the infrastructure layer is the southbound plane (where all the data and traffic is being moved), the API being the northbound plane to control and configure rules and general flow of traffic and the very last third layer being applications made with RESTFUL API and orchestrations tools such as Kubernetes

Anyone in I.T. administration role should be aware of these changes as most businesses will be using less of the traditional Cisco, Juniper Networks, TP. Link and many other proprietary switches/routers in the upcoming future in favor of SDN’s.

Read more on the topic:

Software defined networking in the new business frontier

Difference between Software Defined Network and Traditional Network