ODL is a Linux foundation collaborative project (https://www.opendaylight.org/), in which a community has come together to fill the need for an open and reference framework for programmability and control through an open source SDN solution. It combines open community developers, open source code, and project governance that guarantees an open, community decision-making process on business and technical issues. ODL can be a core component within any SDN architecture.

Building upon an open source SDN controller enables users to reduce operational complexity, extend the lifetime of their existing network infrastructure, and enable new services and capabilities only available with SDN. The mission statement of the ODL project is "OpenDaylight facilitates a community-led industry-supported open source framework, including code and architecture, to accelerate and advance a common, robust Software-Defined Networking platform."

ODL is open to anyone. Anyone can develop and contribute code, get elected to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), get voted onto the board, or help steer the project forward in any number of ways. ODL will be composed of numerous projects. Each project will have contributors, committers, and one committer elected by their peers to be the project lead. The initial TSC and project leads will be composed of the experts who developed the code that has been originally contributed to the project. This ensures the community gets access to the experts most familiar with the contributed code to ramp up and provide mentorship to new community participants.

The ODL controller is one of the early bootstrap projects; we will introduce it in the next section and then we set up our environment for ODL-based Net App development.