Faucet vs ONOS

Faucet is a free, open-source OpenFlow controller for network operators managing production networks and OpenFlow hardware. It moves routing, neighbour discovery and switching algorithms into vendor-independent server software with a centralised control plane. Faucet controls OpenFlow 1.3.x switches with multiple tables and group tables, supporting VLANs, IPv4 and IPv6, static and BGP routing, access control lists, port mirroring and switch stacking. Policy-based forwarding can offload processing to external systems, including 802.1X through hostapd. YAML provides network configuration, with a documented command for checking configuration before loading it. Installation options include pip3, apt-get and Docker; the guide places Faucet with Gauge, Prometheus and Grafana, while InfluxDB supplies time-series statistics. TLS can protect the switch control channel, and fail-secure or fail-standalone modes are available. High availability uses redundant controllers with matching configuration but no shared state. Faucet runs on Linux and self-hosted deployments and is licensed under Apache-2.0.

ONOS is an open-source software-defined networking platform that provides a control plane for managing network components and running communication-service modules. Its µONOS architecture supports device configuration, monitoring and maintenance, forwarding-plane programming, topology validation, and fine-grained performance metrics. A symmetric cluster of identical instances distributes work across servers and is designed to handle instance failures; the architecture is described as highly available and dynamically scalable. Control and configuration interfaces include P4/P4Runtime, gNMI/OpenConfig, and gNOI, with gRPC connecting modular microservices. OpenFlow is the primary southbound protocol, and OVSDB, NETCONF, and SNMP are also named for device configuration. The microservices are designed for cloud and data center infrastructure using Kubernetes, with Docker images and Helm charts listed as deployment tools. A cloud-native web GUI uses Angular and gRPC Web to access backend modules. ONOS is free and published under the Apache License 2.0. It is aimed mainly at service-provider networks, with data-center and campus networks also identified as possible uses. Production downloads are recommended as a release tar.gz package or Docker image; the listed LTS release is X-Wing 2.7.0, dated July 16, 2021.