Hardware reigned supreme in the networking world until the emergence of software-defined networking (SDN), a category of technologies that separate the network control plane from the forwarding plane to enable more automated provisioning and policy-based management of network resources.
SDN’s origins can be traced to a research collaboration between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley that ultimately yielded the OpenFlow protocol in the 2008 timeframe.
OpenFlow is only one of the first SDN canons, but it’s a key component because it started the networking software revolution.
