From the course: CCSK Cert Prep: 2 Infrastructure Security for Cloud

Software-defined networking (SDN) overview - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: CCSK Cert Prep: 2 Infrastructure Security for Cloud

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Software-defined networking (SDN) overview

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- [Instructor] Key role in cloud computing, even at the network level, Software-Defined Networking or SDN relates to cloud customers or tenants easily provisioning virtual network resources in a cloud computing environment. So SDN then is designed to separate the actual network configuration from the underlying vendor-specific solutions. This means that a cloud tenant should be able for example to fill in a couple of details on a webpage to provision a virtual network in the cloud without knowing the command line specific details to actually do that for the underlying equipment. So that underlying equipment would consist of network infrastructure devices like routers, switches, even security appliances like VPN concentrators. So SDN then facilitates cloud network provisioning, especially at alert scale where we have many cloud tenants that want to provision virtual network resources in a cloud environment. The SDN architecture begins with the SDN interface. This is what cloud tenants interact with, such as a GUI web portal or it could be command line tools, even programmatic API calls. Either way, the cloud tenant would interact with the SDN interface to provision for example a virtual network. The next thing that happens is the SDN controller software at the cloud level is considered middleware and it receives the instructions from the SDN interface to provision or configure something at the network level in the cloud. And it actually goes ahead and configures the underlying equipment. So we're talking here then about decoupling the actual commands that would be used to configure network equipment physically from the user interface in the cloud that the cloud user interacts with. So SDN consists of a control and a data plane. The control plane is the user interface to configure the underlying network devices, whether it's GUI-based, command line-based, or programmatic. The data plane is the actual processing of the network traffic by the underlying network infrastructure equipment after the virtual network configuration has been provisioned. So as an example, public cloud providers support SDN, such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or GCP, Amazon Web Services, AWS, to name just a few. There were also virtualization vendors that also support SDN. VMware supports the NSX standard, Microsoft Windows Server includes a network controller server role, and Cisco has the Open SDN Controller, Juniper has OpenContrail. So Software-Defined Networking or SDN is used often in cloud computing to help provision virtual network configurations.

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