Project: Sugarbush

Simple, Programmable Network Services for OpenStack Cloud Tenants

Project logistics

Preferred past experience

Some experience in one or more of the following is preferred in possible team members:

Problem

OpenDaylight (ODL) has emerged as one of the leading Software-Defined Network controllers. It is supported by a large number of major vendors (Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, …). This platform is gaining traction and now supports a variety of applications including applications for network virtualization and cloud (OpenStack).

One key limitation in ODL today is the lack of modularity: many important network applications do not play nicely together. Typically, these ODL network applications assume full control over network element configurations and hence do not compose well with other applications.

Recent work in SDN provides network programming abstractions that promise to make it possible to write applications in a modular way, with components written independently and then combined at a semantic -- rather than configuration -- level. In particular, the Maple programming abstraction, allows programs written in ordinary programming language to be transparently deployed onto high-performance switching hardware through a dynamic translation of the program into the OpenFlow switch abstraction.

The goals of this project are to