On 8 April 2013, the Linux Foundation and 18 founding companies announced the OpenDaylight Project, an open source effort to build a common platform for software-defined networking (SDN). The founders were Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Nuage Networks, PLUMgrid, Red Hat and VMware.
Founding Platinum and Gold members included Big Switch, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, NEC, Red Hat and VMware. They agreed to donate software and engineering resources, according to the Linux Foundation.
The problem: SDN without a shared base
By 2013 SDN had plenty of vendor interest but no common foundation. OpenFlow, developed with the Open Networking Foundation, was adopted by a growing number of vendors. The OpenDaylight backers positioned their work as a complement to the ONF’s efforts, not a replacement. Andrew Harding, a senior director of product marketing at Big Switch, said at the time that the output would complement what the ONF was doing.
Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin compared the effort to earlier open source projects such as Hadoop for big data and OpenStack for cloud computing. He said the same shift was now reaching the network, according to eWeek’s report of the launch.
What the project set out to do
The project described itself as a community-led, industry-supported open source framework meant to speed adoption and innovation in SDN. It was licensed under the Eclipse Public License, a common choice for Java-based projects. It was operating-system independent and expected to run on multiple platforms.
Linux Magazine reported that the first code was expected in the third quarter of 2013. Planned areas of work included an open controller, a virtual overlay network, protocol plug-ins and switch device enhancements.
Members named specific contributions:
- Big Switch said it planned to contribute open source elements of its Open SDN Suite. These included controller code, a high-availability data store, distributed virtual routing applications and network virtualisation and overlay software.
- Brocade submitted proposals for on-demand services spanning the data centre, from storage networking and Ethernet fabric to virtual routing and Layer 4-7 services.
- Cisco contributed controller technology, including an application framework and a Service Abstraction Layer. This gave basic controller functions, southbound plug-ins for protocols such as OpenFlow, and REST APIs exposing the controller’s capabilities.
Jason Matlof, Big Switch’s vice president of marketing, said the collaboration showed SDN moving from pure innovation to commercial integration in existing IT infrastructure. Tom Black, Arista’s vice president of SDN engineering, said Arista was glad to be a founding member.
How it played out
The first organisational dispute came within two months. In June 2013, Enterprise Networking Planet reported that Big Switch was leaving the group after a technical disagreement. Two codebases had been proposed as the base for the platform: Big Switch’s, which grew out of its Floodlight controller, and Cisco’s, described as the largest open source contribution Cisco had made.
David Meyer, Brocade’s chief scientist and chair of the project’s Technical Steering Committee, said that competing approaches are normal in open source communities. A proposal to merge the two codebases was accepted by the project leadership, but Big Switch did not accept it. The project started with the Cisco controller as the base repository, according to the article.
The project remained a Linux Foundation collaborative project. Membership originally had three tiers: Platinum, Gold and Silver. In January 2018, OpenDaylight became a project within the LF Networking Foundation, which put membership across several projects under a common governance structure. Most OpenDaylight members joined the new foundation. That change came five years after the 2013 launch (2018 – 2013 = 5).
Early reaction to the project was mostly positive, according to a summary of its history. Initial criticism held that incumbent vendors might use the group to stifle innovation, but most of the signed-up members did not sell incumbent networking technology.