Why SDN solutions are necessary

SDN solutions are necessary as they allow businesses to simplify their network operations, and it also allows them to automate network functions. It fits well with the DevOps initiative and the need to make network operations more agile.

A byproduct of SDN is that it allows network functions to become as accurate and repeatable as creating a new virtual machine on a hypervisor.

SDN solutions from vendors are made up of a centralized controller that is implemented to become the nerve center of the network. SDN controllers rely heavily on Open vSwitch database (OVSDB), which is a programmable, open standard schema which utilizes the OpenFlow protocol, which integrates directly with switches to route packets in the network as well as applying ACL policies to particular virtual machines, physical servers, or containers.

As long as a switch can talk OVSDB and OpenFlow, then it can integrate with common SDN controllers. There are now a wide variety of SDN controllers currently on the market:

SDN controllers do the following for enterprises:

  • Provide an easy-to-use solution for network functions, with the SDN controllers abstracting the network functions from hardware devices and instead expose GUIs and API endpoints that can be programmatically altered to control network operations.
  • SDN controllers lend themselves to DevOps models such as self-service network operations for developers, which allow Continuous Delivery of network functions and increased collaboration between teams.
  • Provide increased visibility of network configuration as it is described in easy-to-understand software constructs.
  • Provide better integration with infrastructure through the use of open networking standards, so this gives companies choice over which switch vendors they integrate.
  • Allow the same set of policies in a private datacenter to be applied across private and public clouds. This makes the aim of distributing different workloads into different cloud providers a reality and makes security governance of hybrid clouds much easier for security teams.

The emergence of AWS undoubtedly influenced network vendors to adapt their solutions to be less hardware centric and focus more on a software approach to networking, which, in turn, has simplified network operations and made networking easier to scale.

Vendors have now adopted and implemented open protocols to allow centralized management of network functions and allowed network operators to manage the whole network using an SDN controller.

Software-defined networking is being used by businesses to maximize the performance of their network and create repeatable workflows for network operations in the same way hypervisor virtualization helped infrastructure teams automate server provisioning and management.

However, based on my personal experience, software-defined networking in the private cloud is being used to run OpenStack at massive scale. The continued uptake on OpenStack projects by many major companies, such as Walmart, Ebay, PayPal, Go Daddy, and my company Paddy Power Betfair, means that companies are turning to SDN solutions to allow them to meet necessary scaling targets and simplifying network operations.

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