SDN Journey in Verizon: Experiences, Challenges and Path Forward - Yueping Zhang & Sanjay Nayak, Verizon#

Yueping Zhang, Associate Fellow (SDN Technology and Planning), and Sanjay Nayak, Assoc Director, Verizon

• Why: One of the few talks with hard operational experience running SDN across tens of thousands of live network elements — including the admission that SDN has fragmented into disjoint point solutions, which is a candid and useful takeaway for anyone building controller architectures.
• What: Verizon's experience deploying and scaling its Intelligent Edge Network on a full-SDN approach, the challenges of fast-growing 5G traffic, and the evolution of their SDN controller from a monolithic OpenDayLight package to a fully decoupled microservice architecture, framed as a "network factory" concept. (from abstract only)
• How: Decomposing the monolithic ODL controller into decoupled microservices so the control plane can adapt to business dynamics; the greenfield iEN deployment is the reference.
• Where applicable: Large carrier/multi-site operators; Verizon-specific in topology and scale, but the monolith-to-microservices controller lesson and the "SDN as point solutions" critique transfer well.