February 2017

Many of you already know that Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight’s Executive Director for the last 3 years, has decided to take a new role as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Bain Capital. As the OpenDaylight Project’s original Technical Director, and now, Interim Executive Director, I want to add on to the thoughts Neela shared in his final blog last week.

Like Neela, I am proud of all that the Project has accomplished to date, from building an increasingly robust platform capable of supporting some of the world’s largest networks, to our global and organizationally diverse community of contributors, many of whom are also users. One of the best measures of the real-world value of an open source project is an engaged user community, and I’m proud that with our most recent release, more than half of the new projects proposed came from users with active production deployments.

The user community itself spans many of the world’s largest carriers, Chinese webscale companies, leading research institutions, and increasingly, global enterprises in the finance and retail sectors. Of course, these are just the deployments that we at the OpenDaylight Project happen to know about. More than half of users who responded to our Fall 2016 survey have downloaded the code directly from opendaylight.org, for reasons ranging from personal experimentation and research to running small networks in places as farflung as Tunisia, Cameroon, Bolivia, and Nepal. Others use OpenDaylight-based solutions from our commercial ecosystem.

We’re not ones to rest on our laurels, though. Here’s what we’ll be doing in 2017:

• Ongoing Stability, Scalability, Security, and Performance (S3P) enhancements.

• Focus on feature robustness for leading use cases, eg. Service Function Chaining for NFV/Cloud and management plane programmability, as well a ops & analytics tools for network managers.

• Continued integration with larger open networking initiatives; ODL has already become the leading controller embedded in other open source projects such as OPNFV, and the newly formed Open Networking and Automation Platform (ONAP) project, along with strong integration with OpenStack.

• Supporting users with adoption and community engagement; look for a new set of tutorials coming soon, OpenDaylight User Groups (ODLUGs) to join (and lead!), regional workshops and more.

The success of OpenDaylight has contributed to the array of newer open networking projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. My colleague, Arpit Joshipura, recently joined the LF to identify synergies across the projects. I have recently taken on the role of VP of Operations for Networking and Orchestration for the Linux Foundation (in addition to the interim ED role for OpenDaylight), in order to improve developer and infrastructure efficiency, as part of our drive towards greater cross-project collaboration.

I’m excited to bring everything we’ve learned since OpenDaylight began to the related networking projects. At the same time, it is my firm belief that improved collaboration across projects will continue to sharpen the focus and velocity of OpenDaylight development. Finally, and most importantly, the assembly of a modular but well-integrated open networking stack will simplify operations for our developers, vendor members and users alike. I look forward to our continued journey together.

– Phil Robb, Interim Executive Director, OpenDaylight

Blog originally posted on PNDAemic: The PNDA.io blog.

So you want to integrate OpenDaylight with PNDA!

It’s really easy to aggregate data into a PNDA instance. But it takes a little more work to stream data out of an OpenDaylight instance. There are three steps to set this up:

1. Pick a data source, i.e. an OpenDaylight application that can supply data to an OpenDaylight event topic.
2. Configure the OpenDaylight event aggregator to collect the desired data and publish it on a topic.
3. Deploy the OpenDaylight Kafka Plugin and configure it to forward events to the Kafka message bus of your PNDA instance.

THE DATA SOURCE

If you have NECONF enabled devices that send notifications then the odl-netconf-connector might be sufficient to get started. Alternatively you can write a new OpenDaylight application to collect your desired dataset. I have chosen to write an application that uses SNMP to collect IF-MIB:ifTable data. You can get the application from github here: https://github.com/donaldh/if-table-collector.

Once built, the if-table-collector can be started as a standalone karaf instance:

$ cd if-table-collector
$ ./karaf/target/assembly/bin/karaf

Check that the if-table-collector is running:

opendaylight-user@root>bundle:list | grep if-table
270 | Active | 80 | 0.1.0.SNAPSHOT | if-table-collector-api
274 | Active | 80 | 0.1.0.SNAPSHOT | if-table-collector-impl

Now you can tell the application to collect ifTable data from a device. The application uses an augmentation of topology-netconf to enable SNMP collection for a device. Here’s an example:

POST http://localhost:8181/restconf/config/network-topology:network-topology/topology/topology-netconf
Content-Type: application/xml
<node xmlns=”urn:TBD:params:xml:ns:yang:network-topology”>
<node-id>{node-name}</node-id>
<host xmlns=”urn:opendaylight:netconf-node-topology”>{ip-address}</host>
<port xmlns=”urn:opendaylight:netconf-node-topology”>{netconf-port}</port>
<username xmlns=”urn:opendaylight:netconf-node-topology”>{username}</username>
<password xmlns=”urn:opendaylight:netconf-node-topology”>{password}</password>
<tcp-only xmlns=”urn:opendaylight:netconf-node-topology”>false</tcp-only>
<keepalive-delay xmlns=”urn:opendaylight:netconf-node-topology”>0</keepalive-delay>
<snmp-community xmlns=”urn:net:donaldh:if-table-collector”>{snmp-community}</snmp-community>
<poll-interval xmlns=”urn:net:donaldh:if-table-collector”>60</poll-interval>
</node>

You should see the device being polled every 60 seconds:

2017-02-22 16:48:24,079 | INFO | Executing poll cycle for 10.1.1.105 …
2017-02-22 16:48:24,460 | INFO | Polled 6 rows.

CONFIGURING THE EVENT AGGREGATOR

The OpenDaylight event aggregator is responsible for gathering events from the desired data sources within OpenDaylight and publishing them on an specific topic on the OpenDaylight message bus. To get started, we will use a simple topic configuration which matches all notification names for all nodes:

POST http://localhost:8181/restconf/operations/event-aggregator:create-topic
{ “event-aggregator:input”:
{ “notification-pattern”: “*”, “node-id-pattern”: “.*” }
}

DEPLOYING THE KAFKA PLUGIN

The odl-kafka-plugin can be built and added to any OpenDaylight installation. I have a fork of it here that builds for OpenDaylight Boron-SR2: https://github.com/donaldh/odl-kafka-plugin. Once you have built the kafka-agent plugin, you can copy it to the karaf deploy directory to have it auto-deploy into the running karaf instance.

The odl-kafka-plugin simply registers for messages on the OpenDaylight message bus and sends them on to the kafka message bus. It can be configured to listen for specific topics or, by default, listen for any topic. I used the simplest configuration which listens for any topic:

PUT http://localhost:8181/restconf/config/kafka-agent:kafka-producer-config
{
kafka-producer-config: {
kafka-broker-list: “{kafka-host}:9092”,
kafka-topic: “odl”,
compression-type: “none”,
message-serialization: “avro”,
avro-schema-namespace:”com.example.project”
}
}

VERIFYING THE END RESULTS

You can use the Kafka console consumer to verify that messages are being received by the Kafka bus. The messages are AVRO encoded so the textual representation looks a bit weird:

% ./bin/kafka-console-consumer.sh –bootstrap-server $(KAFKA_HOST):9092 –topic odl
?????V$if-table-collector172.16.1.105?
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?><payload xmlns=”urn:cisco:params:xml:ns:yang:messagebus:eventaggregator”><source>172.16.1.105</source><message><IfEntryBuilder><IfAdminStatus>Down</IfAdminStatus><IfInDiscards>0</IfInDiscards><IfInErrors>0</IfInErrors><IfInOctets>0</IfInOctets><IfInUcastPkts>0</IfInUcastPkts><IfInUnknownProtos>0</IfInUnknownProtos><IfIndex>6</IfIndex><IfMtu>1514</IfMtu><IfOperStatus>Down</IfOperStatus><IfOutDiscards>0</IfOutDiscards><IfOutErrors>0</IfOutErrors><IfOutOctets>373</IfOutOctets><IfOutUcastPkts>2</IfOutUcastPkts><IfPhysAddress/><IfSpeed>4294967295</IfSpeed><IfType>Eon</IfType></IfEntryBuilder></message></payload>
…

Assuming you have already configured the PNDA instance to accept kafka messages on the “odl” topic, you will start to see ifTable data in the HDFS datastore.

It is with mixed emotions that I am leaving my role as Executive Director of the OpenDaylight Project to join Bain Capital Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence. I’m excited by this next opportunity to pursue my entrepreneurial passions, but sad to leave such a great community that has been at the forefront of open source and SDN. I am so proud of what we have achieved together over the past 3+ years.

When I joined OpenDaylight as the Executive Director in 2013, our work was cut out for us. We all knew that SDN was necessary and would happen, but there were significant challenges to overcome. Could we get the networking industry to work together and build an open platform that everyone would agree on? Could we build a strong community that developers would want to be a part of? And most importantly, would end users deploy it and embrace open source at the heart of their networks?

Our goal was to unify the industry by building an open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks platform that could be broadly adopted. While there is still more work to be done, I’m proud of the progress and achievements that we have made over the past four years. We brought together service providers, enterprises, vendors, systems integrators, users and app developers to create the largest open SDN project to date. We’ve established a mature governance where people can disagree but still work together to build an even better solution. Our developer community is active and strong; more than 900 developers contributed to the five releases of the OpenDaylight platform.

Most importantly, OpenDaylight has proved to the networking industry that open source can serve as the foundation of their production infrastructures. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Bell and Canada in North America, Orange and Telefonica in Europe and China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent in China are members and/or users of OpenDaylight. We’ve seen large-scale production deployments by numerous major organizations including Tencent, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project and AT&T, and OpenDaylight is the basis for solutions from Brocade, Ericsson, HPE and Red Hat among others.

On a more personal level, it is hard for me to express how much of a privilege it has been for me to lead this community over the past 3+ years. This role has given me a chance to get to know so many incredible engineers, technical and business leaders, and develop relationships across countries and cultures. I have been personally enriched by our interactions and proud of what we have been able to build, against steep odds, together.

I’m so proud to have been a part of the OpenDaylight community and grateful that you’ve trusted me to lead the project and serve as the voice for all of your hard work. I believe in this community, and I expect to stay engaged as I continue working with The Linux Foundation and the OpenDaylight Project as an advisor. I have full confidence in Phil Robb, our Board of Directors, TSC and technical leaders to be able to take the project to even greater heights. I look forward to cheering from the stands as OpenDaylight gets ever more deployed as the industry’s de-facto standard SDN platform.