Don’t understand SDN? That’s because you didn’t read this short story…

A long time ago, there was a village called " Communication Childlike Village".

Every household in the village has a man and a woman .

Every household makes a living by moving bricks.

From different places, moving to different places.

What do they do? It's simple. The men are responsible for moving, and the women are responsible for telling the men where to move.

Every family obeys the command of the village committee .

The village committee according to the needs of the brick factory owner went to tell every household how to move. . .

At the beginning, everyone was happy moving bricks and everything went smoothly.

However, as the number of bricks increased, the village grew in size, and the number of households also increased.

Every time there is a change in the brick-moving plan, the village committee has to notify every household, which is really tiring.

Moreover, because the village committee failed to notify in time, the efficiency of brick moving was affected and the brick factory owners were also unhappy.

Therefore, the village committee invited a girl named " Silly Girl (SDN) ".

This silly girl said:

So, the silly girl drove all the women in each family back to their parents’ homes. . .

Then, the silly girl told the men in every family that they could only speak Mandarin from now on (in the past, men and women in every household spoke their own dialects), and they only needed to listen to her and her team...

Men only listen to silly girls

The silly girl also told the village committee that the brick-moving plan could be directly told to her team.

Thus, a completely new method of moving bricks began to work...

Because the silly girl took full control of the men... the village committee saved a lot of trouble... the orders were directly conveyed to the silly girl...

With the improvement of efficiency, the brick factory owners are happier and can move the bricks wherever they want. . .

The story ends happily...

However, it seems that not everyone is so happy...

The women who were fired▼

(I am the dividing line)

Okay... I don't know if you understand...

The silly girl we are talking about today is the "SDN" which is very popular nowadays .

There are many definitions of SDN, and the more popular definition is the following:

SDN is an emerging network architecture that separates control and forwarding and is directly programmable.

Its core concept is that application software can participate in the control and management of the network, meet upper-level business needs, and simplify network operation and maintenance through automated business deployment.

In fact, to put it simply, it is to software-based and abstract the "traditional hardware and software network".

In simple terms, it means making all the complex traditional network devices invisible to upper-layer applications. The upper-layer management layer only needs to deploy the network simply like configuring a software program to enable the network to achieve the required functions. It is no longer necessary to configure the network devices of all nodes on the network one by one as before.

SDN architecture diagram:

Compare to our previous brick-moving story:

Village: Communication Network

Bricks: Data

Every home: every network device in the network

Man: The forwarding function of network equipment

Woman: Control function of network equipment

Brick factory owner: upper-class user

Village Committee: Internet Service Provider

The benefits of SDN are obvious:

1. Separation of control and forwarding (separation of men and women), each hardware manufacturer can no longer design and install corresponding software systems for each hardware (eliminating dialects), making hardware universal. This breaks the monopoly and reduces equipment costs.

2. The SDN controller performs unified management (the silly girl team takes over the men), realizes centralized control, reduces the difficulty of network maintenance (the village committee does not need to run door to door one by one), shortens the network deployment cycle (brick factory owners can flexibly transport bricks), and reduces operation and maintenance costs.

For those women (traditional hardware equipment vendors), the emergence of SDN is indeed not good news, but for brick factory owners (users) and village committees (service providers), SDN is definitely a popular choice.

So, some are happy while others are sad...

Although SDN looks powerful, it is still in its development stage and many technical details are not mature enough.

However, the open network architecture represented by SDN is definitely the trend of future networks.

This trend is unstoppable.

Okay, I believe everyone already knows what SDN means!

Of course, there are many related concepts in SDN, such as OpenFlow, ONF, and OpenDaylight , which we have not mentioned in this issue. Don't worry, we will introduce them one by one in detail later.

That’s all for this issue, see you next time!

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