This week in the SDN course on coursera there were lots of examples of real use of SDN stuff, for example like the B4 WAN by Google. They got a really interesting and cool interview with the Network Lead at Google - Amin Vahdat. And! They actually put this interview up on youtube so you don't have to be registered for the course on coursera to view the interview. Actually I just noticed all the interviews are there, including the one I mentioned before with the Internetz Architect David Clark.
Programming assignment for this week is to work with pyresonance, which is based on resonance + pyretic which is a controller that can change how network is forwarded/routed based on outside things, like network intrusion or bandwidth caps. This is really new stuff. The code that was put on github was put there just 3 days ago :)
Assignment is to create a load balancer and forward traffic to hosts depending on load :)