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