The Linux Foundation just announced
the formation of a new open source development project intended to harness
contributions from a wide range of cloud and networking industry participants
to accelerate development of a consistently structured framework for
software-defined networks or SDNs. This announcement is a watershed in the networking
industry’s evolution, as it holds the potential to break multiple categories of
developers free from the constraints of sometimes hopelessly constrained API constructs.
By bringing firms as diverse as Cisco, IBM, Juniper, Red Hat, Microsoft, Intel
and VMware (to name just a few) together in a mutual tryst to contribute
intellectual energy and technology contributions to a normalized set of SDN
building blocks that can serve as the foundation on which other application
innovations can be built, the networking community has arrived at a milestone
that has the potential of being its lift off point toward an unprecedented
range of innovation. Multifaceted application systems may just end up having a
rich catalog of easily integrated capabilities that will accelerate their
uptake and deployment.
Is this rosier picture of
network-savvy applications a guaranteed outcome of OpenDaylight’s work? Hardly,
the outcomes remain to be seen from the efforts of its contributors. But is the
possibility of a rapidly developed and richly endowed common foundation of SDNs
significantly improved by forming the OpenDaylight Project versus limping along
with the smorgasbord of SDN approaches we have been experiencing in the first
year of two of the paradigm’s emergence? It’s hard to arrive at a different
conclusion, when you think of the range of talents assembled toward achieving
the project’s objectives, and imagine the best practices in open source
platform development that can be brought to bear on the process with the Linux
Foundation’s experience close at hand. The full Internet community stands to be
the beneficiary with each company that contributes able to reap some of the
benefits for the use cases and applications on which they choose to focus for
their customers.
While momentum is only
discernible with delivery of concrete capabilities along the project timeline, you
can see it foreshadowed by the strength of the contributing assembly. With
proper guidance, it would seem the break-away period for SDN is more within
sight now than it ever has been before.
For details about OpenDaylight, click here.
For more information about ACG Research's cloud computing services, click here.
Paul Parker-Johnson
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