New OpenDaylight Boron Release Strengthens OpenStack Support
Architectures such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) aim to break the networking black box of vendor lock-in proprietary solutions, enabling carriers, service providers and cloud vendors to have complete control over their networking configurations using open source software. And that’s exactly what open source OpenDaylight Project aims to achieve.
The OpenDaylight Project has released the fifth version of its eponymously-named framework, codenamed Boron, which was designed to provide code and blueprints for adopting an SDN architecture.
OpenDaylight was founded in 2013 as a Linux Foundation Collaborative project led by the community of networking and cloud players, including Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Nuage Networks, PLUMgrid, Red Hat and VMware.
“Between Boron and the releases before that, it is striking how much of the innovation that is in Boron actually came from end users,” said Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight executive director. “We had 872 contributors to the code base. If we look at the number of commits, you will see that within a year not only have we added 500 contributors to the code, we’ve actually added 47,000 more code commits.”
More than half of the new projects in Boron came from user organizations, including:
- ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy): ECOMP is an AT&T built controller for next-generation orchestration of Telco networks.
- YangIDE: YangIDE, also from AT&T, is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the YANG data modeling language for the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF).
- NetIDE: An IDE from Telefonica and Intel that makes it easier to share apps across controller deployments.
- EMAN (OpenDaylight Energy Management): Comcast software for measuring and improving energy efficiency for the network.
In addition, the Genius project, a community-wide effort, provides an app-agnostic framework for application composition. This supports the deployment of modular distributed applications as well as Service Function Chaining (SFC). First introduced as a “proof of concept” project in an earlier version of OpenDaylight, Genius is now application-agnostic and can be used to operate production cloud networks.
Boron provides several enhancements to enhance OpenDaylight’s support for cloud deployments. OpenStack-related capabilities have been rearchitected within a unified development framework for better scalability and performance, including clustering, High Availability (HA), and data persistence. Southbound enhancements for virtual network functions (VNFs) include optimizations for the OpenFlow and NETCONF protocols, as well as support for the Open vSwitch and the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK).
The newly incorporated NetVirt project brings improved coordination between the OpenStack Neutron and the OpenDaylight controller, as well as enhanced support for IPv6, Security Groups (via OpenFlow configuration) and VLANs.
The Emerging Networking Software Open Source Ecosystem
OpenDaylight is not the only SDN and NFV project hosted by the Linux Foundation. It’s just one of the many software defined networking projects under the umbrella of the foundation.
“If you look at the networking projects that we’re focusing on at the Linux Foundation, we’re really focused on these kinds of sustainable ecosystems at every layer of the networking stack. If you go a little further down we have things like Open vSwitch, FD.io, IO Visor, and a few more,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “What makes Linux Foundation a unique home for such projects is that it’s able to cross-pollinate projects. Different networking projects not only compete but also co-operate with and complement each other.”
Feature image via Pixabay.
