As OpenDaylight gears up for its ODL-Developer focused event to introduce ideas and planning activities during the Oxygen development cycle, a key focus of the group is to accelerate the time it takes to release new projects into the open source community.
The organization has continued to move quickly on new projects like its latest release of Nitrogen and upcoming ones like Oxygen.
Phil Robb, VP of operations--networking & Orchestration for the Linux Foundation and interim executive director of OpenDaylight, told FierceTelecom that by speeding the time to market for its releases it can better align with other complementary initiatives taking place related to SDN adoption like OPNFV, OpenStack, and ONAP.
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“Our Nitrogen release was a short release, which we scoped down to three months, and we did that for a few reasons,” Robb said. “One of the primary drivers was to better align on bringing these different open source components together.”
Traditionally, OpenDaylight had been on a 7- to 7.5-month development cycle.
“We worked with the OPNFV crowd and looked at OpenStack dates so we could be optimally consumed by some of our major downstream users,” Robb said. “We aligned with a six-month release rather than a three-month release for Nitrogen, which had a small number of features and we’re in alignment with these other projects.
A key focus for the Nitrogen project is the implementation of Karaf 4, which is the component that allows the user to pick and choose what protocols and services their SDN controller will support.
“The biggest change to the latest version is the use of Karaf,” Robb said. “We use Karaf to let users pick and choose which components they want to use when they construct their controller.”
By making this update, OpenDaylight said it improves the management of interdependencies between its component packages with three main user benefits:
Performance: Because Karaf 4 generates and maintains a map of dependencies, both startup and new feature deployment can be much quicker, depending on your configuration.
Broader interaction: ODL depends on 3rd-party features that interact with parts of Karaf, but until the Nitrogen release, they were not covered by the Karaf security features.
Troubleshooting: The same dependency map that speeds deployments also makes it easier to track, isolate and discover breakdowns and errors.
“As we work with the ONAP community these are of interest to them,” Robb said.
ODL is looking to apply its lessons learned in Nitrogen for the upcoming Oxygen release.
This week OpenDaylight is holding an ODL-Developer focused event for introducing new ideas and planning activities during the Oxygen development cycle.
While OpenDaylight has not released specific elements of Oxygen yet, Robb said it will focus on areas like scale and enhanced performance.
“Feature sets for Oxygen are to be announced, but things we’re talking about are more scale and performance, making clustering a bit easier to deploy and monitor, and in-service upgrades,” Robb said. “We know folks using ONAP want a clustered environment and upgrading from one version of OpenDaylight to the next and around the elements of the cluster so the cluster goes down.”