Measuring Success for OpenDaylight: Are We There Yet?

This week at the Network Virtualization and SDN World event in London I’ve had many people ask me some variation of, ‘how is OpenDaylight doing?’ or ‘how are things progressing?’. To answer those questions, I must implicitly answer a different one: how do you judge the success of an open source project like OpenDaylight?

For OpenDaylight, the problem we’re solving is extreme fragmentation in SDN technologies. Success must be measured as progress towards the ultimate goal of unifying the networking industry’s efforts around a common, open, standard code base. OpenDaylight will succeed if and when SDN adoption is high and the vast majority of solutions available to end users are interoperable. So how do you track success towards this goal? One way is to look at the progress being made to deliver such a code base. Many people have been eagerly testing out our first software release, Hydrogen, and poring over new OpenDaylight project proposals on the OpenDaylight wiki. There is tremendous excitement around projects in the next release, Helium, including Authorization and Accounting (AAA), Group Based Policy, SDN Interface Application (SDNi) and Service Function Chaining.

But if the core problem within the networking industry is duplication of effort and technology fragmentation, the real thing to look at is whether people are leveraging the code base and how. It’s been an exciting week on this front. While HP - an active contributor and Platinum member - hasn’t disclosed how it plans to leverage OpenDaylight for its own controller, Bethany Mayer made a set of very encouraging comments to Network World. She acknowledged HP has seen OpenDaylight’s open source “really mature” and reiterated the company’s desire to “take a more active role” in the project. Two major telecom providers here at the show told me that teams within their advanced technology groups are actively working with OpenDaylight code and see it as a key component of their SDN plans going forward. I was thrilled to sit in on a session where Ericsson’s Mats Johansson told the audience that their NFV solution is being built using OpenDaylight code base.

This builds on announcements from Cisco, IBM and most recently Ciena who have openly shared that OpenDaylight is at the heart of their products and future roadmaps. But it’s not just large companies starting to talk about solutions on OpenDaylight. It’s exciting to see a number of smaller vendors doing the same. OpenDaylight Developer David Goldberg talks about the product ConteXtream has built: “When I create a product based on OpenDaylight, I know that I will be able to run it on all of the solutions based on OpenDaylight, which is a big advantage.” Inocybe’s Mathieu Lemay said, “Basing our product roadmap on OpenDaylight gets us faster time to market for our customers.” ADVA’s demo at the TERENA Networking Conference in Europe showcased an interesting solution showing how enterprises can roll out ultra-high definition 4K video services over the network. What SDN controller did they choose to build this around? Take a guess.

So how are we doing? Pretty well I think. Lots of work remains to be done as we charge towards the Helium release, but I am heartened by the tremendous willingness of the community to pick up a young, emerging code base and put it at the heart of their future plans.

-- @NeelaJacques