OpenDaylight Intern Program Adds to SDN Education Opportunities

Yet another educational opportunity for developers interested in open source software appeared this week with the OpenDaylight‘s announcement of an expanded software-defined networking (SDN) summer internship program. It’s not a training program per se, but it’s another way to keep open source expertise coming down the pipeline.

This isn’t the first time OpenDaylight is offering the internships, but it has doubled them in number for the 2015 program. This summer, the organization will welcome 14 interns “who want to obtain real-world development experience from leading networking technologists while contributing to the industry’s largest SDN and NFV platform.”

OpenDaylight says the offering reflects increasing demand for developers with OpenDaylight skills. As evidence, it cites more than 100 current job listings that mention the open source SDN platform, which is developed as a collaborative project with guidance from the Linux Foundation.

“If you want to increase your chances of being employable in the networking industry, there’s no better way to meet people and gain real world experience than as a developer on the open source OpenDaylight Project,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight. “We see more and more companies every day who are looking for people with knowledge and expertise in OpenDaylight. We will only see that number climb in 2015 and beyond. Now is a great time to get involved.”

The announcement of the OpenDaylight 2015 internship program, which is open to students and pays a stipend, follows other news involving open source training initiatives of late. Last month, Mirantis announced new OpenStack training opportunities, while MapR introduced a free Hadoop course catalog.