Democratising the SDN ecosystem

The trend towards adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is in many ways also a result of a growing ecosystem of apps and other services being made available by vendors worldwide. Rather than just being an isolated technology coming into prominence, SDN, when viewed in the larger context of an ecosystem of products and services enabling powerful functionality, signals a global shift in the approach to networking.

And as businesses turn to digital transformation to compete, the importance of the network is further amplified due to the ability to tap into multiple resources, as well as the greater assurance gained from faster, reliable networks. Specifically SDN now makes it possible to rapidly provision and modify network configurations from an accessible web interface.

In the past, network controllers would need to go into minute detail of how certain data is to be transmitted across a network. This would tie the network down to its hardware, and make the entire system far too complex. SDN, by abstracting out the control layer from the data, has brought about greater flexibility in the way networks are able to operate, simplified the network’s interaction from other layers of IT infrastructure, and freed up the network from hardware dependencies.

An immediate result of this is the “democratisation” of the network — services and applications are able to now use the network like a resource, without needing to be hard-wired into specific networking implementations. This has led to the rise of communities, applications, and services around the SDN.

In the recent years, the networking community has carved out a space for SDN in its conversations, and made available support tools for developers and engineers that help educate and provide resources on the topic of SDN. OpenStack and CloudStack, for example, work from the application side to support network virtualisation, allowing modern cloud environments to fully utilise the capabilities of SDN.

Developing SDN tools has never been easier, along with developer support and collaboration tools, with Software Development Kits (SDKs) being released by prominent vendors in the market. Open standards being adopted has also led to a broad consensus being reached on technical approaches to implementations, resulting in greater confidence about the future of SDN.

Because of the way SDN cleanly separates routing and forwarding, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a central aspect of SDN, allowing devices, controllers and applications to communicate seamlessly. APIs unify the disparate world of vendors and their systems connecting to the SDN controller, and allow for innovation to flourish in an environment that is not as strictly tied to legacy hardware and protocols. This allows customers to pick and choose among a wide variety of vendors solutions and prevent lock-in.

Just as mobile platforms like Android and iOS allow for consumer apps built on their systems to compete in an open marketplace, vendors have released platforms that tie-in with their network infrastructure, which SDN permits with ease. Leading SDN vendors have developed a large ecosystem of partners who have built apps that plug into their infrastructure, which benefits both the vendor-partner ecosystem and its customers. Startups providing network services and applications (especially in the security space) have ballooned over the past decade, indicating confidence that the SDN app ecosystem is here to stay.

Vendors are making their SDN offerings as exhaustive as possible, with the recent spate of acquisitions of startups by larger vendors in the SDN space. Enterprises now have options of several comprehensive SDN providers to choose from, many with several partner service offerings on top of the SDN layer.

In the end, an enterprise’s choice of a platform and connected services may depend on how the vendor ecosystem is able to deliver value to business outcomes for the enterprise. An SDN platform rich with security-based apps may be very attractive to a government or an FSI, whereas one with applications specialised for the Internet of Things (IoT) may be more relevant for an engineering firm.

The choice to go with a particular vendor may depend on existing familiarity and comfort level with a particular enterprise. Managed service providers of SDN solutions may also be able to offer heavily customised deployments to fit an enterprise’s particular needs, and offer a “best of all worlds” blend that is both cost-effective and resource-appropriate.

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