Another of the key tenets of SDN technology is to facilitate a much more closely coupled
interaction between applications and the network elements that support them. Specifically, the cycle of provisioning, analysis, and optimization represent three common and
general actions that were often considered as independent in the past. We suggest that
in an SDN approach, these be considered together. This is illustrated in Figure 5-2. The
act of provisioning is that whereby an application indicates a desire to do something,
change something, or generally affect the behavior of the network. The analysis phase
is one of monitoring or gathering feedback from network elements as to their