OpenDaylight Developer Spotlight: Radhika Hirannaiah

The OpenDaylight community is comprised of leading technologists from around the globe who are working together to transform networking with open source. This blog series highlights the developers, users and researchers collaborating within OpenDaylight to build an open, common platform for SDN and NFV.

About Radhika Hirannaiah

Radhika Hirannaiah, is currently working as an intern at OpenDaylight. She received a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Wichita State University in 2014. Her interests include Software Defined Networking (OpenFlow, OpenDaylight etc), Voice over IP, wireless and working on open source software projects.

What projects in OpenDaylight are you working on? Any new developments to share?
I am working on the Cluster integration project. My contribution is to set up an infrastructure and test three-node cluster implementations that support different use cases. I am also working on documentation for setting up, workflow and configuration of OpenDaylight for easy deployment. The challenge is running the integration tests successfully on clustering and I am glad to have put some work in this.

What is the biggest strength of the OpenDaylight community?
The biggest strength of OpenDaylight community is the people who are involved and their continuous contributions. The developers whom I have met are very forthcoming and helpful. As a new member to the community, it was very exciting to install the open source OpenDaylight-SDN based controller and play around with it. The openness involved has definitely brought forward the adoption of SDN.

What are you eager to learn from an experienced OpenDaylight developer?
In OpenDaylight, the developers who are working are very skilled. I am fascinated by the depth and passion for knowledge they possess. It is great learning opportunity to work with such experienced influencers. With the willingness to contribute to the community, I am eager to learn as much as I can.

How do you envision NFV and SDN working together?
SDN and NFV complement each other's approach in deployment, design and management of network services. Though they are mutually beneficial, they do not depend on each other. The advent of NFV and SDN working together will significantly influence the developments in technology. Not only this will lead to combining existing software elements in new techniques but also will lead to creating and deploying new services. We can envision innovation and creativity in the technology for the next few years with NFV and SDN working together.

What advice would you give to an end user who wants to try OpenDaylight for the first time?
Don't be alarmed by the material you see! I would suggest to look for simple install or user guides (cluster specific here) to follow which will help you to install OpenDaylight and play around with it. Subscribe to the mailing lists or forums where you can ask questions. Even by reading the daily digests, you can learn a lot. OpenDaylight wiki is very resourceful. It might be very frustrating in the beginning to understand even simple concepts and you might even break the controller, but you would have learnt more than you would have imagined.

What does your workspace look like?
My workspace is fairly simple. It has my laptop and a stash of papers lying next to it to write some ideas or concepts.