OpenDaylight Project Marks New Dawn for Software-Defined Networking

The Linux Foundation today is announcing a new Collaborative Project: OpenDaylight.

This is a community-led, industry-supported open source framework on top of which companies, organizations and individuals will build commercial products and services for software-defined networking (SDN).

This is about code at the infrastructure level to help shape the future of SDN and every major player is in. This diversity is an early sign of a healthy community and the size and expertise of these companies demonstrate industry-scale support.

By building this level of infrastructure collaboratively, each company can innovate at higher levels of the stack and bring more innovative networking applications to their customers faster. Customers get more choice, better products and services, and increased ease in deployments.

Sounds pretty familiar, right? In the open source community, we know these benefits well. It’s exciting to see the networking industry embrace this strategy. OpenDaylight underscores the trend that is driving innovation today throughout the entire technology industry: a fundamental shift in how software is built – – collaboratively.

In parallel, we have seen how cloud and virtualization technologies have changed every layer of the server and middleware stack. Today the same change is occurring at the networking layer. It’s the last mile of virtualization, and software is literally defining this path forward. We can’t even begin to predict what kinds of networking applications and technologies will come out years from now that will need to be supported.

The companies coming together today understand that the best way to address this historical moment in their industry is to do it together. Collaborative development and open source software, with their rapid iteration and peer review, are the driving force behind modern architectures and well recognized for accelerating technology innovation and adoption.

To facilitate a truly open ecosystem, OpenDaylight is OS agnostic and structured with an open source license, open design, open development, open contribution model and open governance model.  The Linux Foundation is hosting this project because of its experience hosting and assisting some of the world’s largest collaborative development projects. Collaborative Projects at The Linux Foundation are independently funded and governed and we’re happy to support OpenDaylight with many of the same open source best practices familiar to other leading projects.

Based on the level of participation I’ve seen so far and the eagerness of the members to contribute code, I fully expect OpenDaylight to become an important part of networking in the years to come.

For more information on the SDN space and how OpenDaylight will address it, you can check out this video made in collaboration by the founding members of the Project: