SDN and Edge Services

Interactive lessons for a module on software-defined networking (SDN) and edge services. The network stops being hardware you configure box-by-box and becomes software you program from one place — and compute moves back out towards the users and devices that generate the data. Work through the lessons in order; each one is a self-contained interactive page with quick checks and hands-on activities.

Part one — software-defined networks:

• What SDN is, why it exists, and the control-plane / data-plane split
• Inside NICs, switches, routers and firewalls — then virtualising them
• OpenFlow, flow tables and what happens on a table miss
• A Mininet SDN lab on AWS: custom topologies, ping, iperf and packet capture
• MAC and IP addressing, CIDR and subnetting; BGP, VPC peering and Transit Gateway

Part two — edge services and automation:

• Edge, fog and mist computing, and where the edge actually sits
• Content delivery networks: origin and edge servers, caching, and request routing
• Security at the edge: DDoS and AWS Shield, WAF, encryption and shared responsibility
• Cloud foundations refresher, the AWS CLI, and infrastructure as code with CloudFormation
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions, and the AWS Well-Architected Framework