AppFest 2016: Testing at UNH-IOL

Rick Bauer provides a recap of the recent ONF AppFest at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab in this two part series. 

We just returned from the second annual ONF AppFest, sponsored by the ONF Testing & Interoperability Working Group and the ONF Testing Leadership Council. In our next post, we’ll cover a similar event hosted by Beijing Internet Institute (BII) in Beijing—another ONF testing event (too much to cover these days!) The North American event was held at the brand-new University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) in scenic Durham, New Hampshire. Last week, ONF member companies, students, and other participants gathered to test their software against several OpenFlow switch environments, against an assortment of SDN controllers, with a variety of purposes. Some tested for protocol conformance with the OpenFlow 1.3 specification; others tested for functionality against a series of software controllers (ONOS, OpenDaylight, Ryu, etc.); still others wanted insight on ways that they could optimize the performance of their software by utilizing ONF’s set of performance benchmarking tools, currently in development.

Upon arriving at UNH-IOL, we quickly discovered that the facility might be the best AppFest environment we have ever found! The nearly 50 AppFest attendees had a fantastic event. New participant and ONF member Brain4Net was thoroughly pleased in that they were able to test against various hardware platforms and switches. Alexander Rumyankov, chief product officer at Brain4Net said, “First of all, thanks a lot for such good event organization. I’ve never seen such a well-equipped place, which allowed us to quickly interconnect with other participants and saved a lot of time on use case testing. And we could work and eat at the same time!”