In today’s digital age, the world is becoming increasingly interconnected and accessible from anywhere. However, traditional IP networks are inherently complex and difficult to manage due to their distributed control planes and tightly coupled hardware and software components. These networks require manual configurations of proprietary devices, making them prone to errors and challenging to scale. Configuring networks according to required policies and rectifying faults, loads, and changes is labor-intensive and inefficient. This complexity often results in underutilized network resources and increased operational costs. Additionally, the physical network infrastructure is not able to be used to its full potential. To address these challenges, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is considered promising as it simplifies network automation and orchestration and enables research breakthroughs derived from the dissection of the data and control planes. It allows programmers to quickly reconfigure network resource usage, providing enhanced configuration efficiency and increased adaptability to support innovative network designs with better performance. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of SDN related technologies, focusing on its evolution, the role of commonly used OpenFlow controllers, and various architectural frameworks, which help to address scalability issues and other key challenges in the field.