Chapter 2.  Introduction to Software-Defined Networking

As mentioned in the previous chapter, businesses and enterprises are moving towards newer architectures for building and deploying applications. With technologies such as virtualization and containerization, it is possible to rapidly deploy complex and highly scalable applications within an enterprise or on a public cloud or both.

Common IT applications require compute, storage, and networking resources. Traditionally, the server and storage infrastructure was installed and configured by system administrators and then separately, network administrators used to connect the servers and configure the network. This silo-based approach does not scale for today's on-demand and highly automated application deployment needs. Moreover, the traditional network architecture was designed for more static application environment, whereas flexibility is the need of the hour now.

This is where SDN comes into the picture. SDN makes the...