The OpenDaylight Project announced its fifth open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) release, OpenDaylight Boron. Boron is the result of major user-led contributions and engagement, with significant enhancements to cloud and NFV use-case capabilities, as well as to performance and tooling to simplify management of a range of use cases, the group said.
More than half of the new projects proposed came from user organizations, including YangIDE, led by AT&T, provides support for building new YANG models; Telefonica and Intel-led NetIDE, which makes it easier to share apps across controller deployments; and EMAN, led by Comcast, for improved energy efficiency for the network.
Other several enhancements in Boron incldue re-architecting OpenStack-related capabilities within a unified development framework for better scalability and performance, including clustering, High Availability (HA), and persistence. Southbound enhancements for VNFs include OpenFlow and NETCONF optimization, as well as hardware VTEP support, and DPDK enhancements.
The NetVirt project brings new focus to features and performance to OpenStack environments. These include improved coordination between OpenStack Neutron and the controller, as well as enhanced support for IPv6, Security Groups (via OpenFlow configuration), VLANs and other important capabilities. The new architecture enables the ability to grow beyond OpenStack integration by allowing control from other orchestration systems and applications.
The OPNFV project also helped drive a broad set of telco requirements and new functionality in OpenDaylight. As Service Function Chaining has become a key required capability of NFV deployments, collaboration between OpenDaylight and OPNFV SFC-focused projects have led to a number of key improvements including Proof of Transit validating service chain packet-flow, enhancements to support FD.io Service Chain Identification and support for the latest OVS release.
In addition, the Genius project, a community-wide effort, provides an app-agnostic framework for application composition. This supports the deployment of modular distributed applications as well as Service Function Chaining (SFC). First introduced as a 'proof of concept' project in OpenDaylight Beryllium, Genius is now application-agnostic and can be used to operate production cloud networks.
