The OpenDaylight Project has rolled out its ninth release, OpenDaylight Fluorine. The release includes new features important for cloud and edge environments, service function chaining, WAN connectivity, and optical transport.

Highlights of this release include:

• WAN Connectivity. Fluorine includes a mature and robust BGP stack, with improvements in BGPCEP and BGP/MPLS multicast support.
• Optical Transport. Work on optical transport, including the TransportPCE project, has been nurtured within OpenDaylight for some time. Fluorine formally releases Transport PCE for the first time, as a component of the managed release. In addition, Fluorine provides a new reference implementation for OpenROADM-based optical infrastructures control.
• Cloud/edge Computing. Several new features were added to further enhance support for network virtualization within cloud and edge computing environments. This includes improved IPv6 support, support for both stateful and stateless security groups, and SR-IOV hardware offload for OVS. Much of this work has been developed for OpenStack environments, and is now being leveraged to integrate ODL with the
• Container Orchestration Engine for Kubernetes environments.
  Service Function Chaining (SFC). Updates to SFC accelerate delivery of services like network slicing, now supported by OpenvSwitch (OVS), allowing for improved adoption of SFC in the marketplace.

OpenDaylight continued its engagement with other open source projects and standards bodies such as OpenStack, OPNFV, Kubernetes, and ONAP. Notably, ODL code is integrated into OPNFV’s CI/CD toolchain, which slashes the time it takes the OPNFV community to provide feedback to ODL contributors from months to days.

Neon release
The OpenDaylight project is hosting a Developer Forum in Amsterdam from September 23-24, in advance of the next platform release, Neon. The Neon release is expected in early 2019.