  The networking industry, compared to the compute industry, has been slow in
evolving from a closed ecosystem with limited abstractions to a more open
ecosystem with well-defined sophisticated high level abstractions. This has
resulted in an ossified Internet architecture that inhibits innovation and is
unnecessarily complex. Fortunately, there has been an exciting flux of rapid
developments in networking in recent times with prominent trends emerging that
have brought us to the cusp of a major paradigm shift. In particular, the
emergence of technologies such as cloud computing, software defined networking
(SDN), and network virtualization are driving a new vision of `networking as a
service' (NaaS) in which networks are managed flexibly and efficiently cloud
computing style. These technologies promise to both facilitate architectural
and technological innovation while also simplifying commissioning,
orchestration, and composition of network services. In this article, we
introduce our readers to these technologies. In the coming few years, the
trends of cloud computing, SDN, and network virtualization will further
strengthen each other's value proposition symbiotically and NaaS will
increasingly become the dominant mode of commissioning new networks.
