OpenDaylight Unleashes Hydrogen to the Masses

The OpenDaylight Project today announced that its first open source software release Hydrogen is now available for download. As the first simultaneous code release cross-community it has contributions across fifty organizations and includes over one million lines of code. Yes. ODL > 1MLOC. For those of you interested that’s approximately two hundred and thirty man-years of work completed in less than twelve months.

It was around this time last year that the media started to pick up on a few rumors that something may be in the works with software-defined networking and controllers. I remember our first meeting at Citrix where the community started to collaborate on The OpenDaylight Project and come to common ground on how to start something this large. We had multiple companies and academics in the room and many ideas of where we wanted this project to go but there was one thing we had in common: the belief and vision to drive networking software innovation to the Internet in a new way and accelerate SDN in the open; transparently and with diverse community support. Each of us had notions of what we could bring to the table, from controller offerings to virtualization solutions, SDN protocol plugins and apps to solve IT problems. Over two days at Citrix we looked at things from a customer perspective, a developer perspective and ultimately and arguably the most important, a community perspective. From there The OpenDaylight Project emerged under the Linux Foundation. As I look back I want to applaud and thank the companies, partners, developers, community members and the Linux Foundation for driving such a large vision from concept to reality in less than twelve months, which is an incredible feat in itself.

Hydrogen is truly a community release. Use cases span across enterprise, service provider, academia, data center, transport and NfV. There are multiple southbound protocols abstracted to a common northbound API for cross-vendor integration and interoperability and three editions have been created to ensure multi-domain support and application delivery as well as deployment modularity and flexibility for different domain-specific configurations. These packages have a consistent environment yet are tailored to domain and role-based needs of network engineers, developers and operators.

The Base Edition, which includes a scalable and multi-vendor SDN protocol based on OSGi, the latest (and backward compatible) OpenFlow 1.3 Plugin and Protocol Library, OVSDB, NetConf/Yang model driver SDN and Java-based YANG tooling for model-driven development.

The Virtualization Edition (which includes the Base Edition) and adds Affinity Metadata Service (essentially APIs to express workload relationships and service levels), Defense4All (DDoS detection & mitigation), Open DOVE, VTN, OpenStack Neutron NorthBound API support and a virtual tenant network offering.

The Service Provider Edition (again, including the Base Edition) that also offers the Metadata Services and Defense4All but includes BGP-LS and PCEP, LISP Flow Mapping and SNMP4SDN to manage routers, gateways switches.

More information can be found on the website with regards to the releases and projects themselves.

I want to stress the importance of how well the vision has been delivered to date. I’ve been involved in multiple standards-bodies and in open source discussions in the past but this is truly one of the largest undertakings I’ve seen come together in my entire career. OpenDaylight developers have been coding day and night to get this release out the door and it’s amazing to see the collaboration and coherency of the team as we unite to deliver on the industry’s first cross-vendor SDN and NfV Platform. In addition and frequently not mentioned is that many of the protocols listed in the Editions above are also standardized at organizations like the IETF during the same period. Code and specs at the same time. It’s been a long time since rough consensus and running code has been the norm.

Over here at Cisco we’re fully committed to OpenDaylight. We’re currently using it as a core component in our WAN Orchestration offering for service providers to allow intelligent network placement and automated capacity and workload planning. The ACI team (formerly Insieme) collaborated with IBM, Midokura and Plexxi to create a project in OpenDaylight that creates a northbound API that can set policy and be used across a wide range of network devices. And of course we’re bringing components of the OpenDaylight codebase into our own controllers and ensuring application portability for customers, partners and developers alike. From this I would expect to see more code donations going into the community moving forward as well. We made several announcements last week about our campus/branch controller that includes OpenDaylight technology.

At the end of the day an open source project is only as strong as its developers, its community and its code. As we as a community move forward with OpenDaylight I expect it to become stronger with more members joining with new project proposals as new code contributors coming onboard from different industries as well. As I look at our roadmap and upcoming release schedule I’m pumped for what’s next and so happy the community has catalyzed a developer community around networking.

Please do visit the site, download the code and take Hydrogen for a test-drive. We want to hear feedback on what we can make better, what features to add or how you’re going to utilize it. Moreover, we’d love you to participate. It’s a kick-ass community and I think you’ll have fun and the best part; you’ll see your hard work unleashed on the Internet and across multiple communities too.