AbstractWith the advent of cloud computing, many new networking concepts have been introduced to simplify network management and bring innovation through network programmability. The emergence of the software‐defined networking (SDN) paradigm is one of these adopted concepts in the cloud model so as to eliminate the network infrastructure maintenance processes and guarantee easy management. In this fashion, SDN offers real‐time performance and responds to high availability requirements. However, this new emerging paradigm has been facing many technological hurdles; some of them are inherent, while others are inherited from existing adopted technologies. In this paper, our purpose is to shed light on SDN related issues and give insight into the challenges facing the future of this revolutionary network model, from both protocol and architecture perspectives. Additionally, we aim to present different existing solutions and mitigation techniques that address SDN scalability, elasticity, dependability, reliability, high availability, resiliency, security, and performance concerns. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.