The OpenDaylight Project is an open-source software-defined networking (SDN) controller platform that has been in active development for 10 years. Since its launch in 2013, the project has grown and evolved significantly, and it has become one of the most popular SDN solutions used by companies worldwide.

Over the years, the OpenDaylight Project has seen several major changes and developments. In the early days, the project focused on building a flexible and customizable platform for SDN controllers. The platform was designed to be vendor-neutral, so it could support a variety of hardware and software solutions, including switches, routers, and firewalls.

As the project grew in popularity, it attracted a vibrant and active community of developers, users, and contributors. The community has been instrumental in shaping the direction of the project, and it has contributed to a variety of new features and functionality.

One of the major developments in recent years has been the adoption of a more modular architecture. The platform is now broken down into several different components, each of which can be customized and extended to meet the needs of different users and applications. This modular architecture has made the OpenDaylight Project even more flexible and adaptable, and it has helped to cement its position as a leading SDN controller platform.

Another important development has been the focus on performance and scalability. The OpenDaylight Project has been optimized to handle large-scale networks, and it can easily scale to support hundreds of thousands of network elements. This has made it an attractive solution for large enterprises and service providers that need to manage complex networks.

In addition to these technical developments, the OpenDaylight Project has also seen significant growth in its ecosystem. In its lifetime companies like Cisco, Huawei, and Red Hat have contributed to this project the most, however for over the past few years the streams shifted a little and we are proud to share that PANTHEON.tech has become one of the largest contributors to the OpenDaylight project, followed by companies such as Verizon, Orange, and Rakuten.

This diverse ecosystem has helped to ensure that the project remains vendor-neutral and that it can support a wide range of hardware and software solutions.

OpenDaylight has proven over time to be one of the most production-ready and feature-rich controller platforms, used by many companies and communities like ONAP, PANTHEON.tech, Fujitsu, Infinera, Elisa Polestar. In PANTHEON.tech we fast-track our long-term OpenDaylight expertise with our valuable customers and we are delivering all the feedback and code back to the OpenDaylight community.

Looking to the future, the OpenDaylight Project shows no signs of slowing down. The community continues to develop new features and functionalities, and it remains one of the most active and vibrant communities in the open-source networking world. With its modular architecture, performance, and scalability, the OpenDaylight Project is well-positioned to continue to be a leading SDN controller platform for years to come.

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by the PANTHEON.tech Team | Leave us your feedback on this post!

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Have you wondered whether there was anything happening behind the lighty.io curtain recently? Of course there was!

Our team has been very diligently working on improving our portfolio. There have been released various new versions of the open-source project lighty.io, which is our variant of the well known OpenDaylight project.

PANTHEON.tech belongs to the largest contributors to OpenDaylight and therefore we are proud to be able to implement the newest improvements as soon as possible.

Continue reading to find out what’s new on the block.

1. lighty.io YANG Validator 17.0.1

This release was created for our customer who happened to crush into some bugs and made us aware. Our experts fixed the bugs by updating to yangtools version 9.0.5 and reworking on how the tree is traversed.

Cleanups were made, next development phases were prepared and other changes that were executed, you can read all about in the change log!

 

2. lighty.io 16.3.0

In order to remain compatible with the OpenDaylight Sulfur SR3 release, we had to come up with a new release of lighty.io 16.3.0. Interested in what has changed? Find out here!

 

3. lighty.io NETCONF Simulator 16.3.0

As we know, all good thing come in three, yes, lighty.io NETCONF Simulator has also successfully went through a little update to 16.3.0 and this was marked down in the repository.

 

4. lighty.io YANG Validator 16.3.0

However, 4 times is also a miracle and 16.3.0 comes up updated as a whole. Our experts managed to release also a new version of lighty.io YANG Validator 16.3.0 in which we keep being compatible with the OpenDaylight Sulfur SR3 version.

You can read about what’s new you at our github webpage following the red button below.

 

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More articles you might be interested in? Lets see…

lighty.io NETCONF Simulator

Create, validate and visualize the YANG data model of application, without the need to call any other external tool – just by using the lighty.io framework.

If you need to validate YANG files within JetBrains, we have got you covered as well. Check out YANGINATOR by PANTHEON.tech!

 

lighty.io NETCONF Simulator

Need to simulate hundreds of NETCONF devices for development purposes? Look no further! With lighty.io NETCONF Simulator based on lighty.io 17 core, you are able to simulate any NETCONF device and test its compatibility with your use-case.

 

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by the PANTHEON.tech Team | Leave us your feedback on this post!

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Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, also known as SONiC, is an open source network operating system which has been recently given over to the Linux Foundation. This contribution will accelerate adoption of open-networking based white-box devices.

Our team at PANTHEON.tech has been focusing on increasing SONiC’s usability whilst simultaneously contributing to other Linux Foundation projects – like OpenDaylight. We are performing given activities and contributions in order to aim for an achievement in a form of combination of these two powerful projects as well as the orchestration of SONiC based network environments. As PANTHEON.tech has been building its own orchestration platform based on these principles, we consider the model-driven integration between SONiC and OpenDaylight crucial to our growing portfolio.

Miroslav Mikluš, the Chief Product Officer at PANTHEON.tech, is about to give a brief overview of this integration at the upcoming event hosted by the Linux Foundation, ONE SUMMIT 2022 in Seattle, Washington. You can meet him and attend to his presentation SONiC Data Center Automation W/ OpenDaylight next week on Tuesday Nov 15^th 2022, at 4pm (PST) at the Sheraton Grand Seattle hotel.

So make sure you don’t miss out – click here for registration.

 

 

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by the PANTHEON.tech Team | Leave us your feedback on this post!

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PANTHEON.tech has enabled OpenDaylight to migrate to the current version of AKKA, 2.6.x. Today, we will review recent changes to AKKA, which is the heart of OpenDaylight’s Clustering functionality.

As the largest committer to the OpenDaylight source-code, PANTHEON.tech will regularly keep you updated and posted about our efforts in projects surrounding OpenDaylight.

Released in November 2019, added many improvements, including better documentation, and introduced a lot of new features. In case you are new to AKKA, here is a description from the official website:

[It is] a set of open-source libraries for designing scalable, resilient systems that span processor cores and networks. [AKKA] allows you to focus on meeting business needs instead of writing low-level code to provide reliable behavior, fault tolerance, and high performance.

OpenDaylight Migrates to AKKA 2.6

The most important features of AKKA 2.6 are shortly described below; for the full list, please see the release notes.

Make sure to check out the AKKA Migration Guide 2.5.x to 2.6.x, and the PANTHEON.tech OpenDaylight page!

AKKA Typed

AKKA Typed is the new typed Actor API. It was declared ready for production use since AKKA 2.5.22, and since 2.6.0 it’s the officially recommended Actor API for new projects. Also, the documentation was significantly improved.

In a typed API, each actor declares an acceptable message type, and only messages of this type can be sent to the actor. This is enforced by the system.
For untyped extensions, seamless access is allowed.

The classic APIs for modules, such as Persistence, Cluster Sharding and Distributed Data, are still fully supported, so the existing applications can continue to use those.

Artery

Artery is a reimplementation of the old remoting module, aimed at improving performance and stability, based on Aeron (UDP) and AKKA Streams TCP/TLS, instead of Netty TCP.

Artery provides more stability and better performance for systems using AKKA Cluster. Classic remoting is deprecated but still can be used. More information is provided in the migration guide.

Jackson-Based Serialization

AKKA 2.6 includes a new Jackson-based serializer, supporting both JSON and CBOR formats. This is the recommended serializer for applications using AKKA 2.6. Java serialization is disabled by default.

Distributed Publish-Subscribe

With AKKA Typed, actors on any node in the cluster can subscribe to specific topics. The message published to one of these topics will be delivered to all subscribed actors. This feature also works in a non-cluster setting.

Passivation in Cluster

With the Cluster passivation feature, you may stop persistent entities that are not used to reduce memory consumption by defining a timeout for message receiving. Passivation timeout can be pre-configured in cluster settings or set explicitly for an entity.

Cluster: External shard allocation

A possibility to use a new alternative external shard allocation strategy is provided, which allows explicit control over the allocation of shards. This covers use cases such as Kafka Partition consumption matching with shard locations to avoid network hops.

Sharded Daemon Process

Sharded Daemon Process allows specific actors in a cluster, to keep it alive and balanced. For rebalancing, an actor can be stopped and then started on a new node. This feature can be useful in case the data processing workload needs to be split across a set number of workers.

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by Konstantin Blagov | Leave us your feedback on this post!

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by Robert Varga | Leave us your feedback on this post!

PANTHEON.tech continued to be the leader in terms of contributions to the OpenDaylight codebase. While our focus remained on the core platform, we also dabbled into individual plugins to deliver significant performance, scalability and correctness improvements. We are therefore glad to be a significant part of the effort that went into the newest release of OpenDaylight – Sodium.

In Sodium, we have successfully transitioned OpenDaylight codebase to require Java 11 – an effort we have been spearheading since the mid-Neon timeframe. This allows our users to not only reap the runtime improvements of Java 11 (which was possible to do with Sodium), but it allows OpenDaylight code to take advantage of features available in Java 11.

Our continued stewardship of YANG Tools has seen us deliver multiple improvements and new features, most notable of which are:

YANG Parser: has been extended to support Errata 5617 leaf-ref path expressions, which violate RFC7950, but are used by various models seen in the wild — such as ETSI NFV models. YANG parser has also received some improvements in areas of CPU and memory usage when faced with large models, ranging from 10 to 25%, depending on the models and features used.

In-memory Data Tree: the technology underlying most datastore implementations. It has been improved in multiple areas, yielding an overall memory footprint reduction of 30%. This allows better out-of-the-box scalability.

Adoption of Java 11: Java has allowed PANTHEON.tech to deploy improvements to MD-SAL Binding runtime, resulting in measurably faster dispatch of methods across the system, providing benefits to all OpenDaylight plugin code.

We have also continued improvements in the Distributed Datastore. We achieved further improvements to the persistence format, reducing in-memory & on-disk footprint by as much as 25%.

Last but not least, we have taken a hard look at the OVSDB project and provided major refactors of the codebase. This has immensely improved its ability to scale the number of connected devices, as well as individual connection throughput.

If you would like a custom OpenDaylight integration, feel free to contact us!

It is no secret, that OpenDaylight is more than a passion project here at PANTHEON.tech. As one of the staples in the SDN revolution, we are also proud that we are one of the largest contributors to the project, with our PANTHEON.tech Fellow Robert Varga leading in the number of individual commits. Let us have a look at what is new.

YANG Tools 3.0.0

YANG Tools is a set of libraries and data modeling language, used to model state & configuration data. It’s libraries provide support for NETCONF and YANG for Java-based projects and applications.  What’s new in the world of the latest Yangtools release?

It implements new RFCs: RFC7952 (Defining and Using Metadata with YANG) and RFC8528 (YANG Schema Mount).

YANG parser now supports RFC6241 & RFC8528, while adding strict QName rules for “node identifiers”.

JDK11 support has been added together with lots of small bugfixes, which you can read in detail in its changelog.

MD-SAL 4.0.0

The Model-Driven Service Abstraction Layer is OpenDaylight’s kernel – it interfaces between different layers and modules. MD-SAL uses APIs to connect & bind requests and services and delegates certain types of requests.

The new version of MD-SAL has been released for ODL. MD-SAL is one of the central OpenDaylight components. This release contains mainly bugfixes and brings pre-packaged model updates for newly released IETF  models: RFC8519, RFC8528, RFC8529, RFC8530.

Get ready for OpenDaylight Sodium

OpenDaylights development has a new important milestone ahead: the Sodium release, currently scheduled around September 2019. This release will bring new versions of YANG Tools, MD-SAL and other core OpenDaylight components.

JDK11, as well as JKD8, is supported, providing an opportunity for OpenDaylight users to try new features of JDK11. It bids farewell to Java EE modules & JavaFX, as well as performance & bug fixes.

We believe you are also looking forward to these releases and encourage you to try them out!

Don’t forget to contact us, in case you are interested in a commercial solution for your business!

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You can contact us at https://pantheon.tech/

Explore our Pantheon GitHub.

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