With Software Defined Networking (or SDN in short) gaining huge traction over the past few years, numerous start-ups, protocols, frameworks and other applications have started coming up every few weeks. With this also came numerous efforts to standardize around this concept, chief among them being the Open Networking Foundation. Last week saw the emergence of another standards group (rather self-proclaimed) consisting of industry leading networking companies to launch the OpenDaylight project. The OpenDaylight project is an open source effort similar to the OpenStack project to collaborate on SDN related technologies. An extract from the OpenDaylight describing its motivation:
" At this early stage of SDN adoption, the industry acknowledges the benefits of establishing an open, reference framework for programmability and control through an open source SDN solution. Such a framework maintains the flexibility and choice to allow organizations to deploy SDN as they please, yet still mitigates many of the risks of adopting early stage technologies and integrating with existing infrastructure investments.
With OpenDaylight, a community has come together to fill this need through the combination of open community developers and open source code and project governance that guarantees an open, community decision making process on business and technical issues. Establishing an open source project in this way is designed to help accelerate the development of technology available to users and enable widespread adoption of Software-Defined Networking. "
This is indeed a good development but as long as all groups collaborate with each other rather than compete against each other, which will lead to fragmentation and higher cost of implementation and deployment.
However, what is interesting about this project is the use of Java for one of their central component! Yes, for all the cries of Java being dead, we see a new far-reaching project adopt Java as one of their underlying technology. This is indeed good news for the Java platform as well as the greater Java community. This underlines the strength, robustness and applicability of the Java technology for myriad platforms. The architecture of the OpenDaylight project is reproduced below:
Java is used for the Controller platform described above. See this link for an architectural overview. Interestingly, as well, OSGi is also used by the Controller framework. OSGi is a dynamic modular framework for Java which has also been steadily gaining limelight in recent Java developments. OSGi enables the Service Abstraction Layer because of its modular and extensible nature.
There are indeed good times ahead for both the Java and OSGi community.
Happy daylighting!
