Hackathon to build useful enterprise-focused SDN applications

by Srini Seetharaman

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The ONUG Fall 2013 conference highlighted a clear need for SDN in several domains of use. Most of today’s SDN vendors are targeting the need for network virtualization in cloud data centers. This status quo, however, leaves lingering needs in several other domains, including branch office networking, service chaining of L4-L7 appliances, and enterprise WAN. What the industry needs are reference implementations of SDN applications that address these open problems and improve the current mode of operation.

While there are several open-source SDN controller platforms like OpenDaylight and Floodlight, we do not yet see a strong ecosystem of SDN applications. My guess is that folks well-versed in SDN technologies are themselves working on building a platform, or doing academic research on the technology itself. Whatever the case, SDN controller platforms are ready for the community to start exploring and building applications. 

The best way to inspire the community to get started is through a hackathon event, which makes a compelling forum for software developers to get their hands dirty and build useful applications. From our past experience with hackathons, we strongly believe these events are essential to bootstrap the ecosystem of SDN applications. Of course, it is essential that the applications that the developers build are standalone solutions useful to the user groups. This can be facilitated by having the user groups give seed ideas of applications worth building. We plan to do just that at the SDN hackathon at the ONUG Spring 2014 Conference, organized in partnership with SDN Hub.

The goal of the hackathon is to develop well-defined apps for popular controller platforms such as OpenDaylight, Floodlight, Ryu, HP VAN controller, and POX. The SDN Hub team will provide technical support and head the event, while the ONUG board members will provide seed ideas that the attendees can build upon to develop their own SDN application. Participants will form teams of maximum 4 members either prior to the event, or during the group dinner scheduled on Saturday May 3, 2014. The applications defined and developed at the hackathon will be judged by the community and ONUG board member judges based on their impact, uniqueness and technical depth. Each member of the top three teams will win cash awards of $500 for 1st place, $300 for 2nd place and $150 for 3rd place. 

The ONUG SDN Hackathon is privileged to have the following IT business leaders as judges:

Participation is open to all registered attendees of the ONUG Spring 2014 conference, including academics, DevOps, network engineers, and industry veterans. Register here before the 30 seats are taken!

 

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Code, learn, have fun, win prizes! 

To register for ONUG Spring 2014 click here.

Author bio:

Srini SeetharamanSrini Seetharaman is the Technical Lead for Software-defined Networking (SDN) at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Center. Between 2008-2011, he was a member of the OpenFlow/SDN team at Stanford University, where he lead the SDN deployments in several nation-wide campus enterprise networks, including Stanford. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

 

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