I was fortunate enough to spend this morning (and will be here for quite a while) in Silicon Valley at the first ever OpenDaylight Summit. The initial keynotes were good, but for me the event started last night when I had the opportunity to sit with some of my own industry role models and just talk nerdy, nerdy networking.

Considering how very young this project is (10 months), there are a surprisingly large number of people here - over 550 attendees. I’m also happily suprised at the number of folks I’ve seen here that - like myself - do not work for a vendor. Vendor attendance makes sense and isn’t a bad thing but I am most interested in how software like ODL is being used in production environments outside of a vendor POC, so it’s good to have access to those conversations as well.

One thing is clear - the OpenDaylight community is a force to be reckoned with. This being my first immersion into a non-virtual gathering with the folks that make up this community - it’s very evident that this is a community made up of some of the most passionate people in this industry, all working “across the aisle” from a corporate perspective, in order to put forth a framework that allows us to make SDN practical through experimentation.

The big announcement today was obviously the release of Hydrogen - the first major version of ODL, now available for download on the ODL site. Here’s a brief summary of how this first release came about:

WOW - in 10 months, 4759 Commits, 154 contributors, and over a million lines of code. Hydrogen is here. #ODsummit #Opendaylight

— Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) February 4, 2014

The live video stream should also be working during the recorded keynotes, use this link to view (I’ve been told this is IE-only…sorry, not my idea).

After the summit finishes up tomorrow I’ll be posting a more detailed summary of the event, but in the meantime please follow me on Twitter, and look for tweets containing the hashtag #ODsummit for somewhat-real-time updates.

This is such a great time to be in networking.