Software-Defined
NetworkingCornell

Certificate Program

Traditional networks offer limited capabilities to observe current conditions and control forwarding paths. Software-defined networking (SDN) is a fresh approach that provides direct control over network-wide behavior. By implementing standard functionality using both approaches — e.g., shortest-path forwarding — the differences between traditional networks and SDN will become clear.

In this course, you will delve into the fundamental concepts of SDN, opening the doors to a world of programmable networking. Traditional networks have been constrained by fixed protocols, making them rigid and challenging to adapt. SDN changes this paradigm by allowing you to program both the control plane and the data plane. You will begin by exploring the historical context of network design and explore ideas that paved the way for SDN, including systems like Ethane, which introduced programmable network-wide security policies.

Moving forward, you'll explore essential SDN components like the P4 Programming Language and the Network Information Base (NIB), enabling you to implement and manage network-wide algorithms and protocols effectively. Through this course, you will gain valuable foundational knowledge and skills to build on throughout your career, equipping yourself with the terminology and knowledge needed to navigate the world of SDN.

To deliver on service-level agreements, networking professionals know they must continuously manage and optimize their networks. An SDN-enabled network can be managed through software, making network optimization more efficient, flexible, and granular. In this course, you will use SDN to optimize the flow of data through a network. You will identify how network paths affect performance and use SDN to implement optimal traffic engineering. Finally, you will examine operational considerations for SDN-based traffic engineering. The knowledge and skills you gain will help you leverage SDN to ensure network traffic flows as efficiently as possible from one network node to another.

You are required to have completed the following course or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Building Your First Software-Defined Network

To make critical decisions for their teams and clients, networking professionals need real-time data to understand how their network is functioning. Using SDN, you can capture real-time data and integrate it into a network's control plane to enable network automation and efficient scaling. In this course, you will gain the skills you need to understand a network's status. You will use SDN to get visibility into a network and detect changes in network conditions. In addition, you will implement network telemetry with SDN. Finally, you will explore how to integrate monitoring data into the control loop. With these skills, you can better understand how to assess the status of a network and apply these teachings to your projects.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Building Your First Software-Defined Network
• Optimizing the Flow of Data Through Your Network Using SDN

Scaling an SDN-enabled network often requires the integration of new physical boxes such as load balancers, content caches, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems into the network. In this course, you will explore how to customize routing to integrate network functions. With SDN, you can program your network to offload some network functionality to these boxes, giving you the ability to orchestrate the flow of packets through a pipeline of middle boxes. You will discover how to scale up network functions by offloading to hardware and scale out applications using SDN and network functions.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Building Your First Software-Defined Network
• Optimizing the Flow of Data Through Your Network Using SDN
• Getting Visibility Into Network Conditions Using SDN

Network monitoring is historically focused since it enables networking professionals to view and analyze what has happened in a network. Conversely, network verification is future focused since it enables network professionals to predict what could happen in a network based on a specification. In this course, you will specify SDNs in terms of high-level intents. You will then practice verifying SDNs using static and dynamic techniques. By the end of this course, you will have the skills you need to better understand how networks are verified, adding to your toolkit for informed application of software-defined networking.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Building Your First Software-Defined Network
• Optimizing the Flow of Data Through Your Network Using SDN
• Getting Visibility Into Network Conditions Using SDN
• Enhancing Your SDN With Special Boxes