SDNs, Clouds, and Big Data: New Opportunities

Abstract

We are at the cusp of a technological revolution driven mainly by advances in hardware technology, network architectural support, and the ability to process big data. The hardware industry, driven by Moore's law, continues to provide steadily increasing computing capability with diminishing costs. With the support of hardware advances, platforms for distributed storage and processing of big data, such as Apache Hadoop, provide the ability to scalably and reliably process massive amounts of data using a cluster of commodity servers. In parallel, a revolution is ongoing in the networking world. The emergence of the software defined networking (SDN) architecture promises to rectify the ossified architecture of the Internet allowing network managers to flexibly program the network. In this paper, we argue that SDN and big data, two technological trends that promise to revolutionize all aspects of modern life, can leverage the freedom afforded by each other to jointly increase their value proposition. In particular, SDN can utilize the large amounts of operational data to optimize the network behavior, while big data platforms can benefit from the flexible architectural support provided by SDN. In this paper, we will provide a brief self-contained exposition on opportunities for SDN and big data to synergize and jointly optimize. We will also point out open research issues and will identify future directions of work.