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 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’ll begin by exploring the historical context of network design as well as the ideas that paved the way for SDN, including systems like Ethane, which introduced programmable network-wide security policies.

Moving forward, you will 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’ll 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’ll identify how network paths affect performance and use SDN to implement optimal traffic engineering. Finally, you’ll 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.

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’ll use SDN to get visibility into a network and detect changes in network conditions. You’ll also implement network telemetry with SDN. Finally, you’ll explore how to integrate monitoring data into the control loop. With these skills, you’ll understand how to assess the status of a network and apply these teachings to your projects.

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.

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’ll then practice verifying SDNs using static and dynamic techniques. By the end of this course, you’ll have the skills you need to better understand how networks are verified, adding to your toolkit for informed application of software-defined networking.