What P4 programming is and why it’s such a big deal for Software Defined Networking

P4The dawn of software defined networking (SDN) ushered in an era of disaggregation of the networking control plane from the data plane; management of the network was no longer bound to the networking hardware it ran on.
This created a market of overlay control-plane software from companies like Nicira, which was sold to VMware and is now NSX; Cisco ACI and others followed suit. But at the data plane – where network packets are actually forwarded - there has been less innovation, says IDC