Background: What is ONAP SDN-C?
ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform) is a major project for orchestration and automation of network functions, backed by large telecom and cloud companies. SDN-C is one of ONAP's core components — essentially OpenDaylight extended with functionality for executing directed graphs.
SDN-C Deployment Architecture
The vanilla ONAP SDN-C deployment uses several Docker containers:
- Directed Graph Builder — web UI for building directed graphs
- Admin Portal — management web UI for SDNC
- Relational database — the central data store shared by all containers
- SDNC controller — the core container with all directed graph execution logic
The SDNC controller container alone takes more than 300 seconds to initialize and consumes 1.125 GiB of RAM after startup. lighty.io can do significantly better.
Migration Results
| Metric | Vanilla SDN-C | lighty.io SDN-C |
|---|---|---|
| Initialization time | 388 s | 147 s |
| Memory usage after startup | 1,125 GiB | 613.1 MiB |
| Memory usage under load | 1,246 GiB | 937 MiB |
| Avg. graph execution time | 1.49 s | 1.2 s |
| Avg. CPU during test graph | 115.27% | 108.06% |
What Was Preserved
- Full ability to execute directed graphs (demonstrated in video)
- All SDNC API compatibility maintained
- Docker image format preserved — drop-in replacement
Summary
This migration exercise proved that even a complex application like ONAP SDN-C can be migrated to lighty.io in a short time, achieving measurable, significant improvements across initialization time, memory consumption, and runtime performance.
For the full technical migration walkthrough — including blueprint analysis, initProcedure code, and stopProcedure — see the technical deep-dive page.
Interested in further SDN/C performance and architecture optimizations? Contact us.