Discovering software-defined networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) allows network professionals to automate the configurations and management of networking devices within an organization using a controller-based solution. Traditionally, a network professional will need to acquire networking devices such as routers and switches from the vendor, unbox each device, perform operating system and firmware upgrades, apply configurations on each networking device, and verify that the configurations are working as expected. This process seems quite normal as it’s the traditional method that’s been adapted for many years within the networking industry.

The downside of using the traditional method is that many tasks seem to be a bit repetitive and time-consuming, and let’s not forget the network professional needs to manually configure each switch and router. One of the issues that occurs during manual configurations of networking devices is that the network professional...