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2 OpenDaylight concepts and tools
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5 In this section we discuss some of the concepts and tools you encounter with
6 basic use of OpenDaylight. The guide walks you through the installation process
7 in a subsequent section, but for now familiarize yourself with the information
10 * To date, OpenDaylight developers have formed more than 50 projects to address
11 ways to extend network functionality. The projects are a formal structure for
12 developers from the community to meet, document release plans, code, and
13 release the functionality they create in an OpenDaylight release.
15 *The typical OpenDaylight user will not join a project team*, but you should
16 know what projects are as we refer to their activities and the functionality
17 they create. The Karaf features to install that functionality often share the
20 * **Apache Karaf** provides a lightweight runtime to install the Karaf features
21 you want to implement and is included in the OpenDaylight platform software.
22 By default, OpenDaylight has no pre-installed features.
24 Features and feature repositories can be managed in the Karaf configuration
25 file ``etc/org.apache.karaf.features.cfg`` using the ``featuresRepositories``
26 and ``featuresBoot`` variables.
28 * Model-Driven Service Abstraction Layer (MD-SAL) is the OpenDaylight framework
29 that allows developers to create new Karaf features in the form of services
30 and protocol drivers and connects them to one another. You can think of the
31 MD-SAL as having the following two components:
33 a. A shared datastore that maintains the following tree-based structures:
35 i. The Config Datastore, which maintains a representation of the desired
37 #. The Operational Datastore, which is a representation of the actual
38 network state based on data from the managed network elements.
40 b. A message bus that provides a way for the various services and protocol
41 drivers to notify and communicate with one another.
43 * If you’re interacting with OpenDaylight through the REST APIs while
44 using the OpenDaylight interfaces, the microservices architecture allows
45 you to select available services, protocols, and REST APIs.