On The Ground at OpenDaylight Summit 2014

February 4, 2014 in Systems2 minutes

I was fortunate enough to spend this morning (and will be here for quite a while) in Silicon Valley at the first ever OpenDaylight Summit. The initial keynotes were good, but for me the event started last night when I had the opportunity to sit with some of my own industry role models and just talk nerdy, nerdy networking.

Considering how very young this project is (10 months), there are a surprisingly large number of people here - over 550 attendees. I’m also happily suprised at the number of folks I’ve seen here that - like myself - do not work for a vendor. Vendor attendance makes sense and isn’t a bad thing but I am most interested in how software like ODL is being used in production environments outside of a vendor POC, so it’s good to have access to those conversations as well.

One thing is clear - the OpenDaylight community is a force to be reckoned with. This being my first immersion into a non-virtual gathering with the folks that make up this community - it’s very evident that this is a community made up of some of the most passionate people in this industry, all working “across the aisle” from a corporate perspective, in order to put forth a framework that allows us to make SDN practical through experimentation.

The big announcement today was obviously the release of Hydrogen - the first major version of ODL, now available for download on the ODL site. Here’s a brief summary of how this first release came about:

The live video stream should also be working during the recorded keynotes, use this link to view (I’ve been told this is IE-only…sorry, not my idea).

After the summit finishes up tomorrow I’ll be posting a more detailed summary of the event, but in the meantime please follow me on Twitter, and look for tweets containing the hashtag #ODsummit for somewhat-real-time updates.

This is such a great time to be in networking.

Matt Oswalt avatar
Matt Oswalt

Principal Systems Engineer at Cloudflare focused on traffic engineering, Rust, and highly available distributed systems.

Writes primarily about systems programming, Linux networking, machine learning, and lessons learned from building and operating large-scale production systems.