Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking(SDN) architecture grew substantially as a core part of the Cloud computing. My experience on SDN has been in the early days of a popular open source project called OpenDaylight. As compared to the conventional computer networking, the SDN is fascinating in the way that thousands of virtual swtiches can be programmed dynamically on demand with a centralized controller. The control plane is an application which will generate and apply the configuration on the virtual switches like OpenvSwitch on scale.

I drove the effort to enable the Quality of Service feature in Opendaylight. This required integration between OpenStack which typically is user facing and the downstream OpenDaylight which would work behind the scene to configure underlying switches. Opendaylight has a plugin architecture so that it could support various upstream projects other than openstack and downstream projects where network vendors could develop plugins specfic to their hardware. The control plane is typically an application which would expose APIs to receive the request and interpret the data to generate the switch configuration and apply it on target switches. OpenDaylight has been a confluence of network enthusiasts from top network vendors and Cloud Providers. It was a good to learn and contribute.