This site has been moved to https://cloudifynetwork.com/ In the SDN primer blog post, we touched upon the basic building blocks of SDN. In this post we will try to outline how an ideal controller should look like taking a high level look at the SDN controller architecture. Please note that this is just a high level schema and a lot can be implementation specific. We will try to go through some examples as well. As shown in the above figure, SDN spans multiple layers. Given below is a snippet of the different layers which forms the SDN. Forwarding Plane - Handles the packets in the data plane based on instructions from the control plane. The forwarding plane can decide if the packet has to be dropped, if not which next hop to send or at what priority the packet should be sent out etc. Operational Plane - Manages the operational state of the network device. For example, whether the device is active or inactive, the number of ports available, the sta