@Deepak SDN is getting more popular in datacenters because of some of the reasons I described in this lesson. The same thing probably applies to (large) Enterprise networks.
You don’t have to become a super programmer, after all a programmer is also not a network engineer. It is a good idea however to get familiar with scripting and some simple programming languages like Python. Learning how APIs work and how to interact with them is also a good idea. Python is something that I will add here…you can learn the basics of it in a few hours. I will also add more SDN material.
@Hans The actual forwarding of traffic is done in hardware by ASICs which is much faster compared to a “software” lookup where we use the CPU. The forwarding is a task performed by the “data plane”. Feeding the data plane with information with information from the routing table, ARP table, access-list entries, etc. is done by the “control plane”. Most SDN solutions take the control plane out of the hardware and put it in the SDN controller. We still forward our traffic with ASICs.