Traditional network hardware reigned supreme until software-defined networking (SDN) came onto the scene. The emergence of SDN was a big step forward. It allowed for greater speed and flexibility through centralized control of distributed network software, programmatic network infrastructure, and increased security because it delivered scale, simplicity, and visibility into the entire network.
Since being introduced nearly a decade ago, SDN has evolved to solve many different needs, including network virtualization (abstracting networks of the workloads from the underlying hardware), fabric management (making the physical fabric easier to operate), and automation of networks, security, compute, and storage in the cloud.
