Platform For Network-Driven Businesses
Boron (B) is the fifth release of OpenDaylight (ODL), the leading open source platform for programmable, software-defined networks. OpenDaylight has become the de facto platform for service providers and enterprises making the transition to SDN. Learn more about how OpenDaylight is being used in different kinds of organizations here.
With the Boron release, OpenDaylight marks a new milestone in technology and community maturity. Boron is the result of significant collaboration between users, network equipment vendors, and the growing ecosystem of systems integrators and application developers building OpenDaylight-based solutions for unique use cases and user requirements. Building on their deployment experiences and experimentation, several leading user organizations have invested their own resources into the OpenDaylight developer community, originating more than half of the new projects proposed for Boron.
Boron brings a strong practical focus on two leading types of deployments, with enhancements to cloud and NFV support as well as large-scale network engineering. New operational tooling, enhanced performance and improved documentation round out the improved deployment experience. Boron also provides new tooling and documentation to support application developers, as well as greater integration with larger industry frameworks from OPNFV and OpenStack to CORD and Atrium Enterprise.
New Features in OpenDaylight Boron
Common SDN toolchains
Boron includes improvements to several projects related to cloud and NFV, including OpenFlow, OVSDB and OVS/FD.io. The Genius project is an application composition pipeline, useful for service function chaining. OpenStack-related capabilities have been re-architected within a unified development framework for better scalability and performance, including clustering and persistence. The NetVirt project improves coordination between OpenStack Neutron and the OpenDaylight controller, as well as enhanced support for IPv6, Security Groups (via OpenFlow configuration), VLANs, and other important capabilities.
Boron increases support for new methods of approaching classic traffic engineering challenges faced by telco networks. OpenDaylight already provides an exceptionally broad range of southbound protocols, and now continues to build out and standardize how protocols such as OpenFlow, BGP, PCEP, MPLS and NETCONF are used, and how to model them effectively.
Operational tooling
With active deployments supporting revenue-generating services, operational tooling is becoming critical for network managers. The Cardinal project monitors the health of the controller itself, delivered as a service to existing, deployed networki monitoring and analytics tools. The Centinel analytics engine now enables new levels of end-to-end data collection and machine learning to support performance monitoring and bandwidth managment across WAN links. EMAN is an energy management plug-in based on the IETF EMAN spec. The OCP plug-in enables operators to jointly manage radio and fronthaul network provisioning.
Application developer tooling
YangIDE provides new editing support for anyone who needs to work with Yang models — either create new models, make changes to existing models, or to integrate models into new services and custom appliances. NetIDE faciliates interoperability between open source SDN controllers: apps written to Ryu/Floodlight/Pyretic controllers can now be run on OpenDaylight-managed infrastructure. A new approach to clustering in OpenFlow provides high availability to non-distributed, or “singleton” applications without introducing overhead and latency from maintaining and managing multiple instances at once; this allows developers to write to OpenDaylight without needing to know the details of the platform HA implementation.
Architecture Diagram
View the complete ODL Feature List and descriptions.