OpenDaylight (ODL) is marking its sixth birthday on Tuesday with its Neon release, which hardens its SDN controller features while providing support for edge, cloud native and downstream projects.
ODL was the Linux Foundation's first open source networking project when it was founded back in 2013. Last year, ODL was folded into the Linux Foundation's LF Networking umbrella, which also includes FD.io, ONAP, OPNFV, PDNA and SNAS.
ODL's controller emerged victorious from the "controller wars" in the early days of software-defined networking to become one of the most widely deployed open source SDN controllers.
The list of telcos using ODL within their SDN-enabled networks includes AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Tencent and Verizon. ODL's SDN controller is in production in more than 150 organizations around the world—including webscale content providers, enterprises, research organizations and universities—supporting more than 1 billion global network subscribers.
Over the past six years, ODL has served up 10 releases, with Neon being the most recent, with the help of more than 1,000 authors and submitters that contributed over 1,000 commits across dozens of organizations.
On the vendor side, Lumina Networks and Inspur have successfully integrated ODL's SDN controller across various use cases and services.
ODL works with downstream projects such as Akraino Edge Stack, OPNFV, OpenStack, ONAP, and Kubernetes. ONAP is using OpenDaylight in its APP-C, SDN-C, and SDN-R projects for use cases such as 5G and Cross Domain and Cross Layer VPN.
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Neon features additional functionality and features for SDN use cases, such as optical transport networking, WAN connectivity and routing, along with virtual networking in cloud and edge environments.
“Neon speaks to OpenDaylight’s longevity as well as its integration with other projects like Kubernetes, ONAP, OPNFV, and OpenStack,” said Phil Robb, vice president of operations, networking, and orchestration for the Linux Foundation, in a prepared statement. “I am continually impressed by the community’s cohesiveness in delivering platform releases with updates and features that enhance evolving SDN use cases.”
At next week's Open Networking Summit in San Jose, California, ODL will host a Developer Forum on April 1-2 for its next release, “Sodium.”