Developing SDN: Towards software-defined networking

The innovators of the future often rely on the freedoms provided by the supporting platforms to build new online services and web apps on creative ideas. Rigidity and old fashioned thinking would see us stagnating in the present with little advancement beyond small iterational steps.

Therefore, we at UpCloud are always looking for ways to break away from the limitations of traditional cloud infrastructure to offer you our users a truly liberating service. With that mindset, we’ve been steadily building a new networking model on software-defined networking.

Software-defined networking

Software-defined networking or SDN is a technological approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically created network configurations. The goals of SDN features focus on providing improved network performance and monitoring while decoupling the digital from the physical much like cloud computing has done for hosting. More specifically, SDN architecture separates the network controls and forwarding functions to enable the controls to be directly programmed creating an abstraction between the infrastructure and the networking services.

Utilizing SDN, you can expect to be able to create and configure new flexible private networks to shape your cloud connectivity. SDN is also going to enable us to develop new features and improve upon others such as load balancing and floating IP addresses, and much more. How the new features are going to be used will naturally be entirely up to you.

State of beta

We originally announced our plans of bringing SDN onto UpCloud already in our sneak peek into the year and have been working long hours building the new features. For some time now, the new networking stack enabling SDN has been in operation at certain data centres and SDN itself available to limited beta testing.

A big thank you to all of you who have been beta testing the features. After months of development and testing, we are in the process of putting in the finishing touches. The feedback on SDN has been extremely helpful in finalizing the solutions and we are looking forward to the launch!

Coming next

Great news to all of you who have been requesting SDN features, the launch is going to happen soon! Building up to the launch, we are going to be upgrading all of our data centres to run on the new networking model. You can expect to learn more about the upgrades in the coming weeks.

We hope that you are even close to as excited about the SDN launch as we are. It is going to be awesome to finally see SDN enabled for all of your cloud servers. Many thanks to everyone for your patience and stay tuned!