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The OpenDaylight Sodium is the 11th release of the most secure, stable, scalable and performant (S3P) pervasive open source SDN controller platform. Sodium contains new functionality to reinforce OpenDaylight’s leadership in key use cases including WAN connectivity/routing and virtual networking in cloud and edge environments, along with stability and scalability improvements. Download Sodium and get started in OpenDaylight.

Continued Technical Leadership

The close collaboration between OpenDaylight and other related open source projects including OpenStack, Kubernetes (k8s), OPNFV, and ONAP continues to be a key differentiator. ONAP Dublin release includes OpenDaylight in the Common Controller Software Development Kit (CCSDK) project that forms the foundation for the ONAP application controller (APP-C) and the Software Defined Networking Controller (SDN-C). OpenDaylight’s integration with Kubernetes via the Container Networking Interface (CNI) allows users access to its rich functionality for network virtualization.  The OpenDaylight community has also started early collaboration with the Network Service Mesh (NSM) project and this release contains a Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation.

Use Case Enhancements

WAN Connectivity via BGP CEP. The BGP CEP functionality in Sodium release comes with support for  extended optional parameters field length in OPEN messages. The BGP CEP is also verified for handling routes at scale and supports optimized statistics collection with reduced CPU and memory overheads. These enhancements improve the interoperability and extensibility for WAN connectivity.

Cloud/Edge Network Virtualization. Sodium release includes important enhancements in network virtualization especially while interoperating with  container orchestration engines.

Network virtualization simplifies change management further by supporting virtual machine retirement and migration. Network virtualization functionality also has Quality of Service (QoS) and support for flexible load balancing services. These enhancements result in better service-level agreement offerings and efficient multicast traffic forwarding.

Container Orchestration Engine (COE) enhancements come with NSM PoC functionality. The PoC implemented a JSON RPC-based control plane interface showcasing interoperability between OpenDaylight and a microservices-based network function.

Stability & Scalability

The Sodium release includes stability improvements in controller cluster node operations, hardening of OpenROADM 2.2.1 device models in TransportPCE project and user-listing in AAA projects. Similarly other projects including Genius, Netconf, NetVirt and OpenFlow Plugin incorporated  functionality, stability, security, scalability and performance improvements. 

OpenDaylight continues to enhance infrastructure elements such as tools, abstractions and packaging scripts, making it easier for vendors and downstream open source projects to rapidly put-together and deploy OpenDaylight-based solutions. For example, Sodium has optimized Yangtools with improved performance while reducing its memory footprint and upgraded model-driven service abstraction layer (MD-SAL) resulting in improved vendor agnostic interoperability.

This evolution will continue with the next OpenDaylight release (“Magnesium”). 

Download Sodium and get started in OpenDaylight.