Nick Buraglio used OpenDaylight and OpenFlow-enabled switches to build a part of the exhibition network of a large international supercomputing conference and was kind enough to talk about his real-life experience in Episode 47 of Software Gone Wild.

We covered:

• The basics of what he was trying to achieve;
• How the network was SDN-based for years without anyone knowing they should call what they were doing SDN and brag about it;
• How IPv6 and IP multicast support improved over years;
• The role of OpenFlow-based access network in the exhibition network;
• Multiple backup plans they had in case OpenFlow failed;
• Why they decided to use precomputed static flows instead of a more dynamic approach;
• How they avoided the need to handle topology changes;
• How you turn OpenDaylight into a REST-to-OpenFlow converter;
• How they combined OpenFlow access network with routed core network;
• Why they selected OpenDaylight over simpler controllers like Ryu or Faucet (spoiler: because they already wrote CLI for ODL);
• Why they wanted to have CLI in their OpenFlow-based network;
• The bugs they discovered when building the network;
• Why you still need networking engineers (or at least someone with good understanding of networking fundamentals) to troubleshoot networks;
• Why you should start your OpenFlow journey with a hybrid switch that has well-known high-quality traditional networking operating system;
• Why you SHOULD pair a networking engineer with an awesome programmer to get a good SDN solution.

Finally the good news: it worked.