Interested in learning more about network functions virtualization and software-defined networking? Be sure to check out our pages on SDN Programability, SDN Controller Vendors,  Open Source SDN Controllers and events pages to learn about SDN hackathons.

Thanks to software-defined networking, we now have novel platforms to build applications that solve pain-points of network operators. Putting that platform to the test, SDN Hub organized on Dec. 7 a hackathon focused on building useful networking applications.

We encouraged teams to build applications over the open-source OpenDaylight platform. Although OpenDaylight has a steep learning curve for beginners (mainly owing to complex Maven and OSGi usage, and the introduction of the SAL that abstracts away OpenFlow), we chose OpenDaylight because it is a promising controller platform that is stable and does not yet have a strong ecosystem of applications.

On the day of the hackathon, 20 individuals formed five groups to develop SDN applications. Interestingly, all participants were beginners to SDN programming. Although we provided seed ideas of applications to build, all teams choose to define their own solution. After a six-hour deep-dive into the OpenDaylight platform, the teams gave their pitches and demonstrated the applications they worked on. We were truly impressed about the seriousness and excitement that the participants brought to the event!

We were fortunate to have the following industry veterans to judge the entries:

• Neela Jacques, executive director of OpenDayLight project
• Nick Lippis, co-founder and vice chairman of ONUG and Independent Industry Analyst
• Madhu Venugopal, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat and core contributor to OpenDaylight