Rapid Innovation of Open Source SDN at the OpenDaylight HackFest

We just completed our second OpenDaylight HackFest with 65 developers from over 25 companies coming together to make further progress on the evolving OpenDaylight controller architecture, and to write code. Community collaboration on the technical direction for OpenDaylight included discussions about the merge proposal for the Dixon-Erickson (D-E) plan and a deep dive on the Virtual Tenant Networking (VTN) proposal.

The key to any successful HackFest is to make sure that all members of the community gain value from the experience. For a young project like OpenDaylight we had some participants interested in further refining the D-E plan and roadmap - making work items that could be taken by different developers. Others were more interested in collaborating on code creation that has been ongoing for the past several weeks. In addition, this HackFest had a large number of developers new to the project who wanted to jumpstart their ability to participate.

Masashi Kudo from NEC kicked off the HackFest by presenting a VTN proposal including live demos and VTN implementation. After presentation to the full group, people broke into smaller teams to continue work on the VTN coordinator and the VTN manager.

Central to this HackFest was the merge proposal for the D-E plan with its creators - Colin Dixon and David Erickson - adding voice and guidance to the discussion. Collaboratively, the group created a concrete and detailed Host Tracker with improved details, prioritization and difficulty rating so that developers could strategically start hacking. The group worked on fixing performance issues as well as coming to a consensus on which data models were key components of this exercise. As the group looked forward in development efforts, they did a deep dive on the current Service Abstraction Layer (SAL) and methods to evolve it to a model-driven architecture.

Above and beyond the technical progress on OpenDaylight seen at the HackFest we saw further development and growth of the developer community. On day one, more than half of the group attended a “boot camp” (youtube videos here), taking people from having limited or no experience with the code to being able to grab, run and modify it. It was a huge success and an activity that we will continue to have at future HackFests. It was great to see so many new developers well on their way to contributing to, and potentially leading, development activities within OpenDaylight.

By the second day of the HackFest, people were collaborating in groups they formed simply based on their common interests. Face-to-face gatherings such as the HackFest are great opportunities for veterans of the project to strengthen their relationships with other key developers while also allowing newcomers to the project to ramp up quickly.

The next OpenDaylight HackFest is July 22-23 in Portland, Oregon. Please click here to register. We hope to see you there!