SDN: Software Defined Networks

Foreword by David Ward

David Ward

Technological shifts that affect how developers and engineers build and design their business architectures are monumental. These shifts are not applicable to Moore’s law and tend to be transformations that affect not only the IT landscape but the business landscape as well. These shifts tend to occur every 8 to 10 years and have a long-lasting impact on how people build, consume, and distribute technologies. They also force people to frame their business opportunities in new ways.

In 1996, Gartner coined the term “service-oriented architecture.” By 2000, it had taken center stage with the core purpose of allowing for the easy cooperation of a large number of computers connected over a network to exchange information via services without human interaction. There was no need to make underlying changes to the program or application itself. Essentially, it took on the same role as a single operating system on one machine and applied it to the entire infrastructure of servers, allowing for more usable, flexible, and scalable applications and services to be built, tested, deployed, and managed. It introduced web services as the de facto way to make functional building blocks accessible over standard Internet protocols independent of platforms and languages—allowing for faster and easier development, testing, deployment, and manageability of IT infrastructures. SOA drastically changed the way developers, their managers, and the business looked at technology. ...