This article explains how virtual machine traffic is forwarded across compute nodes in an IAAS cloud using overlay protocols such as VXLAN, detailing L2/L3 inter‑node forwarding, control‑plane designs, and forwarding‑plane implementations with Linux‑Kernel OVS, DPDK, NIC offload, and VDPA.
This announcement shares a 43‑page research whitepaper on open cloud network high‑performance gateway technology, explaining SDN fundamentals, analyzing current gateway solutions, and proposing a decoupled stateful‑stateless approach that aligns with open, minimalist network trends, with a download link provided.
This article explains the complete OpenStack Neutron OVS networking stack, covering compute‑node, network‑node and control‑node models, dual‑node deployment, flow‑table design for flat, VLAN and VxLAN networks, L3 routing, external network integration and practical CLI examples.
The article traces the evolution of Taobao’s unified mobile network library AWCN, detailing its MobileSDN architecture across north‑bound and south‑bound layers, key techniques such as IP‑list scheduling, adaptive protocol selection, multi‑path request handling and vendor acceleration, the challenges faced, performance gains observed during high‑traffic events, and future plans for finer network sensing and intelligent scheduling.
This guide walks through Open vSwitch fundamentals, covering version and log management, controller and bridge configuration, flow table manipulation, VLAN, QoS, tunneling, sFlow, STP, port mirroring, aggregation, group and meter tables, and practical SDN application examples such as building virtual topologies and packet redirection.
This guide explains Open vSwitch's origins, core features, software architecture, key components such as ovsdb-server, ovs-vswitchd, and the kernel module, provides step‑by‑step installation on CentOS 7, and details configuration of bridges, ports, SSL, controllers, and flow handling for SDN environments.
This article chronicles the development of the OpenFlow SDN protocol, detailing each version’s enhancements to the control and data planes, the architecture of switches and controllers, and the key concepts such as flow tables, group tables, meter tables, and message types.
This article explains how OpenVSwitch leverages virtual switches, OpenFlow, and sophisticated caching strategies—including microflow, megaflow, Tuple Space Search, Tuple Priority Sorting, Staged Lookup, and Prefix Tracking—to reduce kernel‑user space communication and improve data‑center network performance.
This article traces the Internet’s evolution from Cold‑War‑era research projects like ARPA and ARPANET through the birth of TCP/IP, HTTP, REST, and the rise of SDN, OpenFlow, and P4, highlighting key milestones, standards, and the ongoing push toward fully programmable networks.
This article details the evolution of Alibaba's unified mobile network library AWCN, explaining its MobileSDN architecture, multi‑protocol scheduling, connection management, vendor acceleration, and weak‑network mitigation techniques that together improve request reliability and user experience across billions of app sessions.
The article traces Alibaba Cloud’s large‑scale data‑center network evolution, explains the motivations behind its self‑developed white‑box platforms, details the design and growth of the AliNOS network operating system built on SONiC, and discusses current capabilities and future challenges such as routing, IPv6, SRv6, and endpoint‑network integration.
This article explains how BIGO’s backbone network achieves high availability through a three‑layer design—control‑plane HA using ETCD‑based Raft leader election, data‑plane HA with MPLS SR‑Policy and intermediate Route‑Reflection layers, and business‑level HA that combines traffic, optimization, and fault scheduling to ensure seamless service continuity.
The article explains how 5G/6G network slicing virtualizes a physical infrastructure into multiple logical networks with customized topologies and resources, describes the architectural layers, various isolation techniques across access, transport, and core networks, and outlines operational challenges for end‑to‑end slice deployment.
China Unicom’s cloud‑native platform underwent a five‑month, multi‑data‑center upgrade that replaced its legacy virtual network with an OVN‑OVS‑smart‑NIC SDN control plane, delivering advanced scalability, high performance, and zero‑fault online migration for over 1,300 business applications.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of VXLAN, explaining its purpose, architecture, frame format, VTEP implementations, and advantages over VLAN, Q‑in‑Q, MPLS, and other overlay protocols, while also discussing control‑plane options such as BGP EVPN and SDN automation for modern data‑center networks.
The article explores the evolution of the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6 and IPv6+, highlighting how next‑generation protocols, AI, SDN, and enhanced security create a more convenient, open, intelligent, and trustworthy digital ecosystem.
This article, the second part of the “Open vSwitch Full Analysis” series, explains the structure and operation of OVS flow tables, detailing match fields, actions, priorities, timeouts, and provides practical ovs‑ofctl command examples for configuring flows, VLANs, and tunnels such as VXLAN and GRE.
This article explains what white‑box (white‑label) switches are, outlines their three architectural tiers, discusses the gap between ideal expectations and practical challenges, analyzes their advantages, ecosystem players, customer segments, and the influence of SDN on their adoption.
The article examines the concept of "new infrastructure" in China, outlines the evolution of the Internet toward a third generation, discusses candidate future network architectures such as SDN, CCN, and XIA, and reviews emerging data‑center networking technologies like large‑scale L2, VXLAN, virtual switching, and large‑scale switching, highlighting their role in supporting AI, big data, and cloud computing workloads.
This article reviews the development, open‑source ecosystem, and key technologies of white‑box switches, highlighting their hardware‑software decoupling, programmable networking, hardware acceleration, security considerations, and architectural layers, and discusses future trends and challenges in modern network infrastructure.
This article explains how Software-Defined Networking (SDN) decouples control and forwarding planes, overcomes the limitations of traditional networks, outlines its layered architecture, compares classic and hardware‑centric SDN approaches, and discusses its advantages, relationship with NFV, future prospects, and key challenges.
iQIYI’s SDN‑based full‑network automatic traffic‑scheduling system dynamically balances inter‑ and intra‑province traffic using BGP and policy routing, integrates monitoring, flow collection, DFS backup‑path calculation, and real‑time Kafka/Flink processing, cutting fault‑handling time to minutes and boosting link availability to 99.9999 % while preparing for programmable‑switch and SR‑based extensions.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of white‑box switches, covering their rapid evolution over the past three decades, open‑source ecosystems, hardware‑software decoupling, programmable networking, hardware acceleration, security challenges, and emerging trends shaping future network architectures.
This article provides a comprehensive overview of white‑box switches, tracing their development history, describing open‑source and industry ecosystems, and detailing key technologies such as hardware‑software decoupling, programmable data planes, hardware acceleration, and security considerations for modern cloud‑native networks.
Kube‑OVN, the enterprise‑grade Kubernetes container networking solution developed by Lingque Cloud, has been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, marking the first CNCF‑hosted open‑source CNI project and highlighting its SDN‑based features, security enhancements, and growing adoption by major enterprises.
This article explains how UCloud leverages Segment Routing to redesign its backbone network, detailing the architecture, control‑plane and forwarding‑plane designs, traffic‑engineering features, multi‑scenario access, and future evolution to achieve intelligent, reliable, and highly schedulable connectivity.
This article chronicles UCloud's VPC evolution—from early classic two‑layer networks through SDN‑based VPC 2.0 and the hardware‑integrated VPC 3.0 architecture, covering microservice migration, telemetry, dynamic flow learning, and high‑performance hardware offload to meet modern cloud networking demands.
This article explains what data centers are, outlines their core components—compute, storage, and networking—covers architectural decisions, industry standards, and emerging technologies such as edge computing, micro‑data centers, cloud integration, SDN, HCI, containers, NVMe, and GPU acceleration, highlighting their impact on modern enterprise operations.
In a detailed interview, UCloud’s virtual network lead Zhou Jian explains how the company’s SDN‑based solutions address heterogeneous network challenges—security isolation, performance, and consistent user experience—through programmable VPCs, hybrid gateways, global traffic cleaning, and multi‑cloud connectivity, illustrating the evolution from VPC 1.0 to today’s global backbone.
The article provides a comprehensive technical overview of white‑box (white‑box) switches, explaining their ambiguous definition, three implementation models, the gap between ideal expectations and practical constraints, their cost and customization benefits, the current ecosystem, key customer segments, the influence of SDN, and actionable advice for selecting the right solution.
This article explains the concept of Service Function Chain (SFC), its role in SDN and cloud‑native environments, and details how the OpenStack networking‑sfc project implements SFC through ports, port pairs, port chains, service graphs, and various deployment modes such as chain, tap, and load‑balancing.
This article explains Service Function Chaining (SFC), its role in SDN, the architecture defined by RFC 7665 and RFC 8300, and how OpenStack’s networking‑sfc project implements SFC through concepts such as port pairs, port pair groups, port chains, service graphs, and various forwarding modes.
The article reviews Google’s Andromeda network system presented at NSDI 2018, detailing its large‑scale design goals, a hybrid control‑plane model, high‑performance software data‑plane optimizations, hot‑cold flow separation, and rapid weekly updates that enable pure‑software SDN at cloud scale.
This lesson explains cloud networking fundamentals, covering overlay/underlay architecture, software-defined networking, network function virtualization, private VPC design, ACL and NAT gateways, routing tables, and three hybrid‑cloud deployment models, illustrating how networks enable scalable, flexible cloud services.
This article explains how Openflowplugin uses Cluster Singleton services to elect a master controller for each switch, details the ContextChain registration and instantiation process, and describes how the MastershipChangeServiceManager and ReconciliationFramework enable north‑bound applications to detect and react to mastership changes.
This article provides a detailed walkthrough of Openflowplugin's ContextChain creation process, explaining how DeviceContext, RpcContext, StatisticsContext, and RoleContext are instantiated and linked, and how the resulting ContextChain supports switch lifecycle handling and master/slave role election in an SDN controller.
This article provides a detailed walkthrough of the Openflowplugin handshake in Opendaylight, explaining how the TCP server is started, how channels are initialized, how listeners are registered, how the hello exchange and version negotiation are performed, and how the controller finalizes the handshake by requesting features and sending a barrier message to the switch.
This article details Ctrip’s multi‑generation cloud networking solutions, tracing the progression from early VLAN‑based Layer‑2 designs through SDN‑enabled large‑scale networks to container‑centric and cloud‑native architectures, highlighting hardware topologies, software integrations, and operational lessons for large‑scale data‑center environments.
This article chronicles Ctrip’s network architecture evolution—from early VLAN‑based private‑cloud designs, through SDN‑enabled large‑layer‑2 solutions, to container‑aware hybrid‑cloud and cloud‑native approaches like Cilium—offering practical insights and lessons for large‑scale network engineers and teams.
This article details how NetEase Games implemented non‑stop maintenance for large‑scale online titles by reusing resources with Docker virtualization, evaluating Calico and Flannel overlay networks, and building a custom SDN solution, ultimately improving operational efficiency and player experience.
This talk outlines why organizations pursue cloud adoption, defines cloud‑native goals, reviews emerging trends such as bare‑metal and hyper‑convergence, and shares practical private‑cloud operation experiences, including ITIL processes, project management, and tooling, offering a comprehensive view of national‑level private‑cloud practice.
The article analyzes Gartner's 2018 Data Center Network Magic Quadrant, highlighting major shifts such as Cisco's lead, Juniper's entry, the rise of software‑defined networking vendors, Chinese players' positions, and Gartner's market and technology forecasts for the coming years.
This article chronicles UCloud's evolution from early Open vSwitch‑based SDN to DPDK gateways, evaluates excluded VXLAN and OpenFlow solutions, and explains how adopting Barefoot's P4 programmable switches enabled higher performance, flexible control planes, sharding, and seamless grey‑release upgrades for its cloud network.
This article uses a vivid village allegory to illustrate how Software Defined Networking (SDN) separates control and forwarding, centralizes management, and improves efficiency, while also explaining SDN's core concepts, benefits, and its emerging role in future network architectures.
This article chronicles Tencent's network journey from its modest 2004 infrastructure through rapid expansion, critical incidents, and architectural breakthroughs like SET zones, SDN, and MPLS VPN, illustrating how the company transformed its data‑center operations to support massive user growth.
This article chronicles Tencent’s network infrastructure development over the past two decades, detailing early IDC setups, major outages, rapid expansion during the gaming boom, the introduction of SET architecture, large‑scale data centers, SDN and DCI implementations, and ongoing challenges as the company embraces mobile and cloud services.
TSDN (Transport Software Defined Networking) introduces a major shift in transport network architecture by decoupling hardware, software, services, and applications, offering a unified SDN framework with RESTful northbound interfaces that enable rapid integration with BSS/OSS, customizable apps, agile service deployment, and enhanced network resource visualization and utilization.
This article describes how a mobile‑cloud operations team built a low‑cost, high‑efficiency system using SDN flow‑table analysis, Zabbix monitoring, and automated OpenStack API integration to detect, alert, and block internal and external network anomalies in a large cloud data‑center, dramatically reducing security tickets and response time.
This article presents a practical guide of 36 network‑operation strategies, illustrated with two detailed case studies that show how solid technical knowledge, automation, and cross‑department collaboration can dramatically reduce faults and improve efficiency in modern SDN environments.
The article explains how Alibaba’s Edge Network, using the NetO intelligent traffic scheduling system, combines real‑time internet quality monitoring, SDN‑enhanced BGP routing, and extensive peering to optimize both inbound and outbound paths for millions of global Double 11 shoppers, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Tencent Cloud’s Supermind intelligent network uses IP publishing control, a backbone SDN, and AI‑driven path selection to bypass congested public‑Internet segments, providing low‑latency, fault‑tolerant cross‑region traffic scheduling for millions of users.
This article analyzes the shortcomings of traditional TCP/IP networking, explains the principles of Software‑Defined Networking and OpenFlow, examines flow‑table evolution, and explores overlay technologies like VXLAN, while discussing the ongoing industry debate between revolutionary and incremental approaches.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of ONOS, an open‑source SDN controller tailored for telecom operators, covering its origins, design principles, architecture, community ecosystem, performance benchmarks, real‑world deployments, and its strategic positioning against competing controllers like OpenDaylight.
Professor Mei Hong’s comprehensive lecture explores the evolution of software from integrated hardware to virtualized, programmable platforms, highlighting the rise of software-defined networking, cloud services, and the challenges of architecture, quality, security, and lightweight virtualization in the emerging software-defined era.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of Software‑Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), detailing their concepts, major vendor solutions, open‑source projects, industry challenges, and the considerations CSPs must address when adopting these technologies for agile, automated network services.
This article explains the relationship between Software‑Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud platforms, detailing cloud service models, OpenStack core services, OpenDaylight controller architecture, and the integration mechanisms that enable unified management of network, compute, and storage resources.
This article explains the definition, origins, business benefits, and future of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), its relationship with Software‑Defined Networking (SDN), and how industry groups like ETSI and OPNFV are shaping its adoption in modern data centers.
This article traces the evolution of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) from its early research roots at Stanford through key academic breakthroughs, industry milestones, major open‑source projects, and the rise of SDN‑related startups, highlighting both scholarly and commercial developments up to 2017.
The article explains network virtualization concepts, the evolution of NFV and its architecture—including VNF, NFVI, and MANO—while illustrating how SDN complements NFV and why software‑defined, cloud‑based approaches replace traditional dedicated hardware in modern telecom networks.
SDN (Software‑Defined Networking) transforms the entire network into a software system managed by a controller, while NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) virtualizes individual network devices; together they enable rapid, automated deployment of network services, with SDN providing automation and NFV supplying software‑based equipment.
This article outlines the evolution of network technology, the rise of SDN, the challenges of traditional network operations, and how SDN-driven automation, monitoring, and DevOps practices are reshaping network operations and service quality management.
The Global Cloud Computing Open Source Conference in Beijing showcased Huawei’s leadership with talks on joint innovation for digital transformation, the evolution of OpenSDS, Golang‑based DevOps orchestration, and SDN solutions in OpenStack, while previewing upcoming sessions on cloud‑driven development and open‑source community governance.
The article explains how hybrid cloud adoption demands on‑demand, elastic networking and argues that Software‑Defined Networking (SDN) provides the scalability, multi‑vendor interoperability, reliability and intelligence needed to seamlessly connect private and public clouds.
The article explains how the rise of the Internet of Things is driving a new wave of edge computing and SDN technologies, which together enable real‑time processing, data aggregation, reliability, and security for massive device deployments across industries.
This article explores how leveraging Flow technology and software‑defined probes can virtualize, visualize, and secure large‑scale cloud networks, addressing challenges such as scale, VTEP endpoints, traffic complexity, and enabling scalable, intelligent, and fast‑response network analysis.
Hengfeng Bank successfully migrated over 150 core banking applications to an OpenStack‑based financial cloud, combining high‑availability designs with internet‑style simplicity, and introduced innovative TAPaaS and SDPM solutions to ensure multi‑tenant performance monitoring and regulatory compliance.
This article details how Qihoo 360 built large‑scale traffic analysis, VxLAN deployment, and SDN practices to automate network operations, improve visibility, and support security, while sharing real‑world challenges, solutions, and a Q&A on network automation strategies.
This article traces the evolution of network engineering from simple early‑day admin tasks to today’s high‑pressure, large‑scale operations and outlines the skills and mindset needed for engineers to become true network architects.
At Ctrip, the Netranger system leverages software-defined networking to automate network operations, from server port provisioning and switch onboarding to configuration visualization, security zone management, IP path discovery, and syslog alert analysis, addressing the challenges of a traditional, high‑change data‑center network.
The article examines long‑standing pain points in network operations—from industry bias and costly manual tasks to data‑center networking and interconnect challenges—while exploring how SDN and modern automation can reshape the role of network engineers for more resilient, business‑driven infrastructures.
The July 16‑17 IETF Hackathon in Berlin brought together over 150 developers and standards experts, showcasing ONOS's open north‑ and south‑bound programmability through four IETF‑aligned scenarios, remote lab integration, and award‑winning innovations in SDN networking.
This article reviews ten essential OpenStack networking talks from the Austin OpenStack Summit, summarizing each session's focus, rating, key insights, and practical comments to help developers, architects, and users stay current with SDN and cloud networking advances.
This article provides a detailed overview of VMware NSX SDN, explaining its key components—NSX Manager, virtual switches, controller, and Edge services—and how they enable software‑defined networking, virtualized routing, firewalls, load balancing, and other layer‑2 to layer‑7 functions in modern data‑center environments.
This article explains the fundamentals of Software-Defined Networking, describing how SDN separates control and data planes, introduces programmable APIs like OpenFlow, outlines basic components such as switches and controllers, and discusses the evolution, flow tables, and north‑bound interfaces for network management.
The article explains why telecom operators must adopt an evolutionary SDN migration path, outlines practical steps such as small‑scale trials and centralized path computation using PCE, and details the supporting protocols like BGP‑LS and PCEP for seamless coexistence with legacy networks.
This article explains Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a software‑driven overhaul of traditional IP networks, highlighting its ability to separate control and forwarding, simplify management, accelerate service deployment, and transform networks into programmable platforms akin to an Android system for networking.
The article reviews the challenges Docker introduces to traditional virtualization networks, explains the concepts of SDN, compares three open‑source container SDN solutions (Flannel, Calico, Weave), and details Qiniu's practical implementation of overlay networking, OpenFlow control, service discovery, load balancing, and security groups for microservice architectures.
The article analyses how the surge of data traffic and OTT services force traditional telecom operators to abandon hardware‑centric models, adopt IT‑oriented strategies such as SDN/NFV, confront mobile‑manufacturer eSIM threats, and compete with rapidly growing virtual operators while reshaping their organizational structures.
The article analyzes how traditional telecom operators must transform their hardware‑centric models by embracing cloud, virtualization, SDN/NFV, big‑data analytics, and new competitive pressures from OTT services, software‑based SIMs, and virtual operators to stay relevant in the evolving ICT landscape.
The article examines the contrasting approaches of software-defined networking and hardware reconstruction in modern data centers, detailing SDN architectures like Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, OpenFlow, NFV initiatives, virtualized networking, and software-defined storage, while highlighting common goals of scalability, automation, and cost control.
An in-depth overview explains OpenStack’s Nova-Network and Neutron architectures, compares their networking models, discusses node roles, high-availability strategies, overlay technologies like VxLAN, and offers practical guidance for selecting the right network component based on business scenarios.
This article explores how Software‑Defined Networking (SDN) has moved from theory to large‑scale deployment in public‑cloud environments, detailing overlay technologies like VXLAN, integration with NFV, practical migration challenges, and real‑world use cases—including automated path probing and controller‑based solutions—while also highlighting a company’s own SDN products.
In an interview at the DCD Shanghai conference, Alibaba’s network planning expert Cao Jie explains how the company views Software‑Defined Networking, its benefits for operational efficiency and flexibility, and its roadmap for deploying SDN across Alibaba’s data‑center infrastructure to support cloud computing and e‑commerce workloads.
The presentation reviews Alibaba's ongoing transition to a large‑scale, SDN‑driven data‑center network using OpenFlow hybrid switches, VXLAN overlay, automated deployment, and discusses the challenges, solutions, and future directions for network elasticity, hybrid cloud integration, and standardization.
This article compiles a comprehensive list of open‑source SDN controllers, switches, and related tools—covering projects like OpenDaylight, RYU, Open vSwitch, and many others—to help network engineers and researchers navigate the rapidly evolving SDN ecosystem.
The article reviews various definitions of Software‑Defined Networking, examines its primary use in network virtualization, discusses additional application areas, outlines obstacles to adoption, critiques OpenFlow limitations, and offers practical recommendations for successful SDN deployment.
The Ctrip OpenStack Shanghai meetup gathered over 100 practitioners to share in‑depth technical sessions on Neutron distributed virtual routing, SDN and network virtualization, OpenStack upgrade and Bare Metal, large‑scale OpenStack operations at eBay, mobile management solutions, and Ctrip's desktop cloud platform.
This article outlines eight essential considerations—including industry type, network size, complexity, workload dynamics, VM count, agility needs, security simplification, and resource availability—that organizations should assess to determine whether Software‑Defined Networking is a suitable investment.
