- The way we have traditionally configured network
devices for decades is to go to a device,
enter appropriate command line interface
commands, and then move to the next device,
enter commands, move to the next device, and so on.
But the future of network configuration
is really programmability.
And in this lesson we're going to introduce you to SDNs,
software defined networking, where we can write programs
that will communicate our intent to a network controller.
Then that network controller can simultaneously
send appropriate commands out to multiple end devices
and configure those for us,
so we don't have to go to each device one by one.
But as we're sending this information back and forth,
and depending on what utility we're using,
we might have to have our data formatted in a specific way.
So we're going to take a look at a couple of ways
of formatting our data.
Specifically, we'll check out JSON and XML formatting,
and we'll also talk about YANG data modeling.
But let's get started with an introduction
to software defined networking.