OpenDaylight's Fluorine release offers new features for edge and cloud environments

The OpenDaylight Project (ODL) announced its ninth platform release this week, which includes various improvements to cloud, edge and wide area network use cases.

OpenDaylight's latest release, which is called Fluorine, has several new features designed to further support network virtualization within cloud and edge computing environments, which are key to service providers' networking plans.

Flourine has improved IPv6 support for both stateful and stateless security groups and SR-IOV (single-root input/output virtualization) hardware offload for Open vSwitch. OpenDaylight said much of the work in this area was developed for OpenStack environments and is now being leveraged to integrate ODL with the Container Orchestration Engine for Kubernetes environments.

On the optical transport side, Flourine also features the formal release of OpenDaylight's TransportPCE project, which it has been working on for some time. TransportPCE allows service providers to configure their WDM equipment in order to handle requests from an software-defined networking (SDN) controller.

Flourine also provides a new reference implementation for Open ROADM (reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer) for optical infrastructure control. Flourine includes improvements in BGBCEP and BGB/MPLS multicast support for use in SD-WAN deployments.

"Fluorine is one of the most streamlined releases to date for OpenDaylight, delivering a core set of mature components needed for most major use cases in a 'managed release' for easy consumption by commercial and in-house solution providers, as well as by downstream projects such as ONAP and OpenStack," said the Linux Foundation's Phil Robb, vice president for operations, networking and orchestration, in a prepared statement. "In addition, the release includes critical updates to clustering and service assurance to improve scalability, security and reliability to support our large end user deployments, including solutions from Cornell University, Globo.com, Orange, Tencent and others all using OpenDaylight to further their open networking initiatives."

RELATED: Linux Foundation introduces the LF Networking Fund, harmonizes​ open source, open standards

While OpenDaylight is made up different networking components that were designed to enable software-defined networking, it's perhaps most well known for its SDN controller. AT&T and Verizon use Lumina Networks' SDN controller, which is based on the OpenDaylight controller.

Earlier this year, the Linux Foundation put some of its open source communities, including OpenDaylight, under the Linux Foundation Networking brand to foster cross-project collaboration.