Oxygen is the eighth release of OpenDaylight. With Oxygen, the OpenDaylight community continues its role as the key intersection point of several key trends up and down the networking stack.
Date Plane Abstraction
Oxygen introduces a P4 plug-in for the platform, increasing its value for key market segments, such as carriers and large cloud providers, who have embraced data plane abstraction. The P4 community, now part of the ONF and Linux Foundation, represents over 60 companies, many of whom are also OpenDaylight users and contributors.
Containers
The Container Orchestration Engine project introduces a plug-in for Kubernetes as well as development of Neutron Northbound extensions for mixed VM-container environments. This is a first step in a longer-term effort to support container-based workloads as well as provide management tooling for container networking itself.
Harmonization
The networking community has filled in most parts of the open networking stack with various open source projects, spanning from the data plane to orchestration and analytics. OpenDaylight has become a key upstream component of other solutions such as ONAP (as the SDN-C) and OPNFV’s Virtual Central Office (vCO), making the synchronization of release timelines between projects ever more important. To support this drive towards harmonization with downstream projects, the OpenDaylight developer team is putting special attention on release efficiency via architectural and process enhancements. The implementation of Karaf 4 in Nitrogen was a first step in that process.
With Oxygen, OpenDaylight begins the move to a “managed distribution” model, which decouples non-core projects from the main release process and allows them to evolve at their own pace. Meanwhile, core, centrally “managed” projects benefit from close monitoring by the community for health, impact on overall platform stability, and timeliness of meeting release milestones. This evolution will continue with the next ODL release (“Fluorine”). Learn more about this process in the Oxygen blog.
