News

Demand for SDN Internships, New Members Highlight OpenDaylight Growth

• By David Ramel
• 02/11/2015

The open source OpenDaylight project is adding software-defined networking (SDN) internships in response to increased demand and has announced several new members to further its goal " to advance SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV)."

New members announced yesterday include CA Technologies, IIX Inc., Megaport and Spirent Communications.

"The growth of the community is really quite astonishing -- already, over 300 developers globally are working together on OpenDaylight to solve real-world problems for end users and deliver the network agility and automation our industry needs," said exec Neela Jacques in a statement. "With more and more end users looking to use ODL in their real-world networks, we're seeing and broader range of technologies and players getting involved. These new members bring key management, security, and testing capabilities to the ODL community."

Founded in April 2013, the Linux Foundation project's members page lists 44 companies, led by industry heavyweights IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Intel, Cisco and more.

And just last week, the organization announced it was expanding its 2015 internship program "as demand for open source SDN expertise rises."

"If you want to increase your chances of being employable in the networking industry, there's no better way to meet people and gain real world experience than as a developer on the open source OpenDaylight Project," Jacques said. "We see more and more companies every day who are looking for people with knowledge and expertise in OpenDaylight. We will only see that number climb in 2015 and beyond."

The group pointed to SimplyHired to show the nearly 150 available positions mentioning OpenDaylight.

To help fill those positions, the internship program is increasing its number of available positions from seven last year to 14. Successful applicants will work directly with the developers contributing to the organization's third and fourth project releases coming this year.

From the project's description, there's plenty of work to do:

At its core, OpenDaylight is an SDN controller written in Java and utilizing OSGi bundles to promote modularity and easy extensibility. The controller exposes both RESTful and OSGi interfaces for applications and controller services (Northbound, or above the controller) and also has a pluggable architecture allowing for multiple and different network protocols (Southbound, or below the controller). Some of the protocols currently implemented include OpenFlow versions 1.0 and 1.3, OVSDB, NETCONF, BGP-LS, PCEP, LISP, and SNMP. In addition, there are various extensions available beyond the core controller to provide functionality such as virtual networking, DDoS and network policy management.

Some of the suggested projects that interns can work on include Jabber bindings, dependency and version tracking tools, and a release dashboard, among many others. Interns aren't limited to working on those projects.

Interns will work with mentors from remote locations -- no physical facilities will be provided.

Internship applications close on March 27, but it sounds like applicants had better have their coding chops in order. From the project's site:

Being accepted as an OpenDaylight intern (either through the Google Summer of Code program or other internships available) is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out as well.