SDN application orchestration and Resource Management Technology

The ultimate goal of SDN networks is to serve diversified business application innovations. Therefore, with the deployment and promotion of SDN technology, more and more business applications will be developed. Such applications will be able to conveniently call the underlying network capabilities through the SDN Northbound Interface and use network resources as needed.

SDN is already an indisputable fact in the industry. It can be widely used in cloud data centers, broadband transmission networks, mobile networks, and other scenarios, providing network resource services for cloud computing services is a typical case. As we all know, in the current cloud computing business, server virtualization and Storage Virtualization have been widely used. They pool and share underlying physical resources, and then allocate them to users on demand. In contrast, traditional network resources are far from achieving similar flexibility, and the introduction of SDN can effectively solve this problem.

SDN blocks the differences between underlying physical forwarding devices through standard southbound interfaces and virtualizes resources, meanwhile, flexible northbound interfaces are provided for upper-layer businesses to configure networks and call network resources as needed. The well-known OpenStack in the cloud computing field is a cloud management platform that can work at the SDN application layer. By adding an SDN management plug-in to its network resource management component, managers and users can use the SDN Northbound Interface to conveniently call the network capabilities opened by the SDN controller. When a VM instance requires networking (for example, creating a user-specific VLAN, related network policies and configurations can be centrally formulated on the OpenStack management platform interface, and then the SDN controller can be automatically distributed to related network devices in a unified manner.

Therefore, network resources can be the same as other types of virtualized resources and presented to business application developers in a unified manner with abstract resource capabilities, developers do not need to perform additional adaptation work for the differences between underlying network devices, which facilitates rapid innovation of business applications.