Book Image

Building Modern Networks

By : Steven Noble
Book Image

Building Modern Networks

By: Steven Noble

Overview of this book

<p>As IT infrastructures become more software-defined, networking operations tend to be more automated with falling levels of manual configuration at the hardware level. Building Modern Networks will brush up your knowledge on the modern networking concepts and help you apply them to your software-defined infrastructure.</p> <p>In this book you'll gain the knowledge necessary to evaluate, choose, and deploy a next generation network design. We will cover open and closed network operating systems (NOS) along with the protocols used to control them such as OpenFlow, Thrift, Opflex, and REST. You will also learn about traffic engineering and security concepts for NGNs. You will also find out how to fine-tune your network using QoS and QoE.</p> <p>By the end of the book, you'll be well versed in simplifying the way you design, build, operate, and troubleshoot your network.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
2
Networking Hardware and Software
4
Using REST and Thrift APIs to Manage Switches
9
Where to Start When Building a Next Generation Network

Summary


In this chapter, we talked about programmable networks, more specifically, how OpenFlow works, the different OpenFlow controllers available, and the hardware that can use OpenFlow.

OpenFlow was conceived at Stanford in their Clean Slate lab as a way to overcome the limitations of current networking and allow for programmable (SDN) networks. The OpenFlow standards original release version was 0.8.9 and has moved to 1.5 at this time.

OpenFlow version 1.0 was functional but only utilized one table, partly due to the limitations of the hardware at the time. In OpenFlow 1.1 multiple tables were introduced, helping to push OpenFlow further into mainstream networking. Today most vendors are standardized on OpenFlow version 1.3, a few support 1.4 but are backwards compatible.

In the next chapter, we will discuss REST and Thrift-based APIs.