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February 2017

The Next Chapter of OpenDaylight

By Blog

The Next Chapter of OpenDaylight

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

Integrating ODL with PNDA open source data analytics platform

By Blog

Integrating ODL with PNDA open source data analytics platform

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.

odltopnda

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.

A Note from Neela Jacques

By Blog

A Note from Neela Jacques

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.

OpenDaylight Project Announces Leadership Transition

By Foundation News

OpenDaylight Project Announces Leadership Transition

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 20, 2017– The OpenDaylight Project, the leading open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks, today announced Neela Jacques is leaving to join Bain Capital Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence.  Phil Robb, newly appointed Vice President of Operations for Networking and Orchestration at the Linux Foundation will serve as Interim Executive Director of OpenDaylight.

“I’m incredibly proud of the amazing accomplishments the OpenDaylight Project has made in the past four years. When I took over as Executive Director of the OpenDaylight Project, the concept of a community-driven project working in unison to develop a programmable, flexible network infrastructure based on open source seemed implausible,” said Jacques. “We not only achieved our goal and created a vibrant, united community, but we continue to innovate and push the industry forward. OpenDaylight has evolved into a modular open SDN platform for networks of any size and any scale. I’m excited to explore new opportunities at Bain Capital Ventures and I know that I leave the OpenDaylight community in the best of hands with Phil and the incredible team that he and I have built.”

“Neela carefully crafted a vision for OpenDaylight that’s proven successful and positions us well for future progress as The Linux Foundation continues to aid the networking and telecommunications industries to retool for the next wave of innovation,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation. “We appreciate the significant role Neela played in establishing the Linux Foundation as the premier home for open source networking projects and wish him continued success in his new endeavors. With a robust community behind it, OpenDaylight will continue to evolve and prosper with Phil as its leader steering the project forward.”

As the Linux Foundation’s most mature open networking project, OpenDaylight is central to the organization’s growing portfolio of networking projects, ranging from data plane to control plane and service orchestration. Arpit Joshipura, recently named General Manager, Networking and Orchestration for the Linux Foundation, is working closely with Robb to better align the different components in the open source networking ecosystem with the goal of rapidly increasing deployments.

“It has been a true pleasure to work with Neela, nurturing OpenDaylight from a small start-up project to one of the most-deployed open SDN technologies in existence today,” said Robb. “We have a vibrant community of more than 2,000 vendor, user and individual developers who recently delivered our fifth platform release, Boron.”

OpenDaylight is delivering on its mission to unite the industry around a common SDN platform that can be individually leveraged, extended and monetized. Jacques’ leadership inspired major milestones including large-scale, commercial deployments among global service providers, telecommunications companies and enterprises. OpenDaylight counts all tier-one North American carriers, Orange and Telefonica in Europe and the top three Chinese carriers China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom as members or consumers of the technology. OpenDaylight also is the basis for solutions from Brocade, Red Hat, Ericsson and HPE among others.

“Because of both his passionate evangelism and tireless commitment to behind-the-scenes details, OpenDaylight is a major force in the market,” said François Lemarchand, OpenDaylight Board Member and Head of NFVI Product Strategy, Ericsson. “He’s cultivated a commercially meaningful ecosystem based on OpenDaylight – pointing the community in the direction necessary to address real-world networking pain points.”

“The OpenDaylight Project’s goal is to unite the networking industry and advance the state of the art of SDN through open source collaboration,” said Chris Wright, OpenDaylight Chairperson and Vice President and Chief Technologist, Red Hat. “Neela has been at the helm of the OpenDaylight Project, carefully listening to our diverse community, encouraging all forms of participation, engaging with the industry, and striving to find alignment across competing goals. His steady hand and tireless advocacy for both the open source community and the developing commercial ecosystem has helped OpenDaylight realize our core goal of uniting and advancing the networking industry.”

“It is nearly impossible to overstate how rare it is to find somebody like Neela, who brings an immense set of leadership skill, business knowledge and strategic direction to a project like OpenDaylight, while still honoring the open source project’s allegiance to its developer community first and foremost,” said Colin Dixon, OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee Chair, and Distinguished Engineer, Brocade. “Neela has formed deep bonds with huge swaths of the developers and earned the respect of the entire community in a way that very few people expected and even fewer could have accomplished. His ability to bring the whole community and stakeholders together to chart our course has been instrumental for OpenDaylight’s success and his presence will continue to be felt not only in OpenDaylight but in the open source networking ecosystem for some time to come.”

In his new role, Jacques will be working with Managing Director Enrique Salem, former president and CEO of Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC), out of Bain Capital Venture’s San Francisco and Palo Alto offices. With a focus on the infrastructure space, Jacques will explore early stage companies and new ventures for the firm, leveraging his broad industry connections, vast networking expertise and knowledge of adjacent high-growth technologies such as containerization and blockchain.

About the OpenDaylight Project

The OpenDaylight Project is a collaborative open source project that aims to accelerate the adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) for a more transparent approach that fosters new innovation and reduces risk. Founded by industry leaders and open to all, the OpenDaylight community is developing a common, open SDN framework consisting of code and blueprints. Get involved: www.opendaylight.org.

OpenDaylight is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

Additional Resources

∙       OpenDaylight Blog

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RCR Wireless News: Telecom organizations boosting support for open source

By In The News

Organizational support for open source initiatives is easing the integration of platforms into the telecom world.

One key challenge for growing the support of open source into the telecommunications space is through various organizations that are looking to either bolster the use of open source or build platforms based on open source specifications. These efforts are seen as beneficial to operators and vendors looking to take advantage of open source platforms.

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