2014: go beyond hype and enter the SDN deployment age

In 2013, we saw a lot of new SDN products, architecture, marketing activities and conferences. Some new standards and open-source organizations also entered this field. At that time, SDN had just returned from the high point of the hype cycle. In the twinkling of an eye, in 2014, we will see the adoption of real products, including the development and deployment of multiple industries. What really matters is that we have seen the collaboration between developers, network engineers, academic institutions, standard organizations, and partners reach a climax, the pace of action by many vendors has never been seen in the network and infrastructure industry since the 21st century. People can say with emotion that this is the speed of software (S in SDN! After March 2014, we will enter April 2015 again, which will be greatly improved, because as we enter the "post-SDN" phase of the hype cycle, people will focus on migrating from products and architecture to complete solutions and deployment. We have seen many successful or failed deployment cases in Multiple conferences, programming marathon, and subsequent academic papers and white papers.

SDN is an important pillar of the Network architecture. The same is true for Network Function Virtualization (NFV. As more open and interoperable infrastructure and solutions are quickly adopted, we will also see the emergence of multiple platforms and communities based on these architectures. In this transformation of the Internet, SDN is obviously not an independent technology. SDN, NFV, and cloud service orchestration are all bundled together for service and solution delivery. Deployment of routing and signaling protocols, automation as a feasible technology, and running of SDN applications such as control plane software that has been deployed for a long time already have a great demand. Although SDN is a "hybrid" network, it is normal in reality. SDN and programming interfaces that are being discussed are gradually standardized across all layers of traditional networks. A lot of work is focused on transmission, line and Service Activation, as well as routing and MPLS. The combination of stream sensing technology and commercial services has produced many exciting results! The community and standard organizations have accelerated their transformation and are committed to resource management and modeling, fault and performance analysis and comprehensive analysis, as well as experience guarantees and harmonious arrangements for Wan and access networks. On these foundations, the focus of the industry's next step is to move from testing to deploying products.

What has changed is that the data center is not the only focus of discussion. Not everything will go to a large data center. The world will be "Multi-cloud". These clouds will vary with the network topology and distance, Transmission Bit overhead, laws and regulations, and new data distribution rules, as well as the differences between countries and industries, because privacy and security are the centers of the world. In addition, enterprise IT departments have become accustomed to using programming interfaces and controllers. The high efficiency, practicality, and time-saving of programming interfaces, and one-click Service deployment and SLA in multiple environments are all important to enterprises. University campuses, branches, small and medium-sized enterprises, and consulting institutions are all leveraging the advantages of SDN. This year has changed a lot!

There is a theme that hasn't changed, that is, the open (standard, source code, and ecosystem), interoperable components and architecture will generate a new market for service and content providers and enterprises. Then, we can see that the virtual services that we had to build and deploy in the past few weeks can be completed in just a few minutes as new products enter different locations in the network. This will create a new market. What I really want is a combination of technology and business. They were split before, and now they come together to create a new market. For example, the video service in mobile networks, the shopping cardlike security function deployed on demand, and the real-time collaboration technology, no matter what content, what devices, how to access and where. New interfaces and portals connect these services with end users. SDN and NFV deployed in the network industry will make all these services a reality and be simpler and more automated.

However, we also need to face new challenges: applications, content developers, and end users do not want to regard the network as what they need to know. For a network engineer, this means that eventually an application or workload sends a signaling to the network, telling the network user what "experience" they expect through their own applications and services ", then the network can meet the user's needs through programming. Therefore, it is no longer the network trying to guess and respond, or the need for a long-term Service Activation configuration cycle. Do you think this is crazy? This is the new goal of the SDN movement in 2015. Currently, standard organizations and the entire open-source community are extensively discussing this.

Many of these new services depend on OpenStack and OpenDaylight projects. They are two major communities in this ecosystem. In 2013 and 2014, they appeared in the SDN sandbox test site and joined the traditional standard-setting organizations. The open-source community has increased its pace of development, making it faster from concept verification to development and products. "Let executable code prove it" becomes a new mantra (this is also the mantra of IP developers in 1970s, 1980s and 1990s ). Open source has clearly become a new way to develop standards. More individuals, enterprises, service providers, partners, suppliers, and users can not only brainstorm, but also use these open-source solutions, it can also make the ecosystem and solutions more open. The more participants, the more open the ecosystem and the solutions it generates. The result is that a faster and more stable solution will be developed by multiple communities, all of which are based on SDN, NFV, and cloud service orchestration. Of course, this sandbox will be accelerated this year and the future, and new forums and industry alliances will emerge.

The speed may be the same as the development of the new SDN Protocol in 2012 and 2013. In 2014, SDN and NFV will go beyond the hype stage, enter the actual deployment stage, and spread to new network locations and services. The new ecosystem is driving more service aggregation (mash-up), giving birth to startups and new personalized software platforms and cloud environments. The new SDN and NFV cloud platforms must be programmable, robust, open, interoperable, and coexist in virtual and physical environments. They can reliably combine access networks and clouds. This is the development direction of the network industry that all of us need.

David Ward
March 26, 2014

This document is excerpted from the Chinese version of software defined network.