By Abhijit Kumbhare, OpenDaylight TSC Chair
The OpenDaylight community is pleased to announce the availability of the 12th release of the most widely deployed open source SDN controller platform, OpenDaylight Magnesium! In addition to ongoing deployments, maturity and stability, the release brings two new projects, new features that help with service provider use cases, deeper cross-project collaboration with ONAP, and improvements in S3P (stability, security, scalability and performance).
OpenDaylight celebrates its seventh year as a project (!!!) and introduces Magnesium as the world enters an unprecedented time, unlike anything this generation has ever seen. I am continually impressed and humbled by the strength and cohesiveness of the ODL community, over the past several years now, especially, in this uncertain time. Thank you to all involved! Read on for release highlights.
Magnesium Highlights
- New projects: The Magnesium release includes two new projects—DetNet and Plastic. The new projects deal with deterministic networking for performance sensitive traffic and model-to-model translations, respectively.
- New Features for Service Provider Use Cases: The community contributed several new features to the TransportPCE and BGPCEP projects, making OpenDaylight even better suited to service provider use cases. TransportPCE took a step forward in the control of open optical infrastructure domains while the BGPCEP project added support for missing features from RFC 5440 and a BGP-LS topology provider for segment routing. In addition to these two major areas of enhancements, the Genius project, that provides generic network interfaces, utilities, and services, added support for Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for OpenFlow tunnels. This makes it easier to detect if the tunnel is bidirectional or not.
- ONAP Integration: the OpenDaylight community provided an optimized distribution of the Magnesium release to the ONAP project so that OpenDaylight can be consumed efficiently by a number of ONAP controllers. Distribution is being integrated successfully by the ONAP Common Controller Software Development Kit (CCSDK) project and will be available in the upcoming ONAP Frankfurt release.
- Improved Functionality, Scalability, and Stability: The Magnesium release continued to make progress around S3P. For example, the OpenFlow plugin and the Netvirt project improved cluster stability, scale, and performance. The projects also include updated documentation, upgrade process description, and numerous bug fixes. The Daexim (data export/import) project has improved scalability and supports processing of very large data sets. Projects such as Genius, OVSDB, NETCONF, and AAA include a variety of improvements in the areas of scalability, performance, and bug fixes. Moreover, the Magnesium release includes Java Developer Kit (JDK) 11 that brings with it a number of security features such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, newer ciphers, key agreement improvements, and root certificate additions. In total, Magnesium includes 70+ improvements and bug fixes!
In addition to new features, projects, integrations, and updates, ODL is seeing ongoing industry momentum. Member company Lumina Networks contributed to the Plastic and BGPCEP projects and also released updates to the Lumina SDN Controller 11.2.0 to align to theOpenDaylight Sodium release.An early version of the Magnesium release TransportPCE project was used in a live demo at the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) 2020 in San Diego, CA, to show interoperability of OpenROADM equipment from six suppliers and to control a low latency optical layer build from ROADMs and OTN flexponders. Orange played a central role in moving the project forward. And PANTHEON.tech continued their contributions to the core OpenDaylight platform as well as individual plugins; specific contributions covered JDK 11, YANG Parser, In-memory data tree, OVSDB, and distributed datastore efforts.
Visit the Magnesium Release Homepage
Comments from key contributors:
PANTHEON.Tech: “PANTHEON.tech’s focus remained on the core platform, while we also dabbled into individual plugins to deliver significant performance, scalability and correctness improvements. We have successfully transitioned the OpenDaylight codebase to require Java 11 and improved the YANG Parser, In-memory Data Tree, OVSDB Project & Distributed Datastore.”
Orange: “TransportPCE magnesium release is a major step forward in the control of open optical infrastructure domains. It completes previous releases focusing on an OpenROADM based WDM layer, proposing an experimental support for OTN, that will be hardened over the magnesium release train. The Northbound interface is upgraded to OpenROADM Service 5.1. Current set of APIs have been enriched to expose an abstracted WDM/OTN topology in accordance with T-API version 2.1.2 to higher layer controllers/orchestrator and to provide an interconnection with the GNPy tool for path calculation/validation including nonlinear impairments. An experimental inventory feature is also introduced for OpenROADM 1.2.1 devices, planning an extended support to 2.2.1 in the next magnesium releases.”
Lumina Networks: “The Magnesium release is a great example of the community’s commitment to enabling open control of multi-vendor networks. With this release, we were happy to represent the interests of several network operators to continue to progress to the functionality and scalability of heterogeneous environments. The Plastic project in particular, is a data model translator which breaks the dependencies on vendor libraries and plugins. We’re thrilled to work with the community on projects like these which ease the extensibility of open source network control.”
