opnfv

OPNFV’s first Plugfest was held at CableLabs’ facility in Louisville, CO. This event, which focused on deployment and integration of OPNFV as well as Virtual Network Function (VNF) applications, was open to both OPNFV members and non-members.

A key goal of the Plugfest was to fortify OPNFV’s already unique testing projects and infrastructure (functional and performance) across new use cases from OPNFV members and other interested parties.  Forty one participants from nineteen organizations–including three non-members–from around the world attended. They brought their key NFV use cases and the technologies needed to bring them to fruition. Many commented that the in-person collaboration was a major benefit.

OPNFV began eighteen months ago as an effort to ensure that open source projects such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight and others can be integrated into a carrier-grade environment that fully supports the performance and availability requirements of service provider networks.

Accordingly, OPNFV, along with CableLabs and Kyrio, hosted the plugfest to help establish testing criteria and find testing solutions to ensure NFV interoperability.

Mitchell Ashley, President and General Manager of Kyrio said, “Kyrio was founded by CableLabs to bring innovations and expertise to the market.  Our experienced engineers are thought leaders in NFV. We congratulate OPNFV on its inaugural plugfest! It supports our mission to guide the community in virtualizing network services.”

The Plugfest used the test functionality first methodology and then measured results accordingly. The Functest (function testing) and Yardstick (system measurement) projects were heavily represented, along with the the Storperf (storage performance) and CPerf (controller performance) projects. In particular, the Cperf project is doing extensive SDN controller integration on various installers.

Additionally, all of the installer groups (Apex, JOID, Fuel and Compass) were represented and members extensively used these installers on different platforms (including on-site community labs that were generously provided by Huawei and Intel).

The Plugfest focused on the installation of NFVI and of VNFs (such as vIMS and vEPC) on multiple hardware platforms using multiple installers. In many instances, these combinations were attempted for the first time, and with OPNFV’s testing infrastructure in place, new VNF were benchmarked much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

In addition to all the real-time interop testing of NFV infrastructure and applications, the Plugfest included several well-attended and valuable breakout sessions on OpenDaylight, the Functest and Yardstick testing projects, and a session on the entire OPNFV testing ecosystem. Many of the lessons from these sessions were immediately applied in the lab. All lessons from the entire Plugfest will be fed back into OPNFV Certification & Compliance Committee efforts.

As we look to the future, we hope to expand future Plugfests to multiple geographic locations. This will allow OPNFV to test our multisite applications. We will also concentrate on new use cases made possible by the Colorado release. As with this Plugfest, OPNFV will continue to reach out to other communities to get a broader spectrum of users involved in NFV application development.

About the author of this post

Tetsuya Nakamura is a Principal Systems Architect at CableLabs and member of the OPNFV Board of Directors.

Susan James, head of Product Line NFV Infrastructure, Business Unit Cloud & IP, Ericsson, will deliver a keynote at the OPNFV Summit  titled “Making OPNFV the Platform for Industry Growth”

Tell us about your involvement in the OPNFV project and where you’re currently integrating open source networking solutions.

For the Colorado release, Ericsson is leading five projects within OPNFV and we are also contributing to 15 more projects. Being an active member from the beginning, we started out heavily invested in the infrastructure-type projects and building the community. We have also been very involved in the testing and SDN- related feature projects.

Two of the projects we’re leading in OPNFV are: Service Function Chaining (SFC) and SDN  Distributed Routing and VPN (SDN VPN), which are both focused on adding advanced networking features to the OPNFV platform. The SFC project is about creating a reference solution for Service Function Chaining based on the SFC implementation in OpenDaylight. The SDN VPN project is about adding E2E orchestration of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) using the OpenStack Neutron Stadium project called BGPVPN, which provides an extension of the Neutron API for managing VPNs and corresponding extensions to Heat. In OPNFV, we are combining this with the OpenDaylight VPN Service, which is one of the backends BGPVPN supports.

What is your perspective on the evolving relationships among standards, open source, and vendors? What could each of these do better?

It’s taking shape, much thanks to initiatives like OPNFV. As with previous standardization activities, it is about working together; vendors, operators and interested parties working to establish a market and ensure that this can be done in multi-vendor environments. In addition to standards, we are taking advantage of working with open source as well so we get the best of both worlds. We will see more open source and community work in the future, and getting to actual implementation rather than discussing on paper is key for progression.

What new technology or trend in the networking space are you most curious about and why?

The new trend we see coming full speed for next year is about hardware evolution and acceleration such as SmartNIC, especially for Telco NFV deployment. It would be interesting to see OPNFV share some common vision on this and kick off some related activities.

What do you see as hurdles to broad industry adoption of NFV?

Confidence. I think that we have solved a number of the key issues that have been what I would call hygiene factors. Now it is about understanding not only what this means from a technology transformation perspective, but also what this means from an operations perspective. This is why we see the focus shifting towards MANO and how that transformation will take place as automation will be key to the success of the journey. Interoperability will continue to be a focus as this is not something that comes for free. It requires all parties to continue to work together to make this happen.

Please give us a preview of what you’ll be sharing on-stage at OPNFV Summit.

Virtualization is now starting to happen and I will be talking about what various service providers see as the main drivers for it. One driver is certainly improved automation capabilities. I will discuss some reflections and experiences from early NFV deployments. Furthermore, I will talk about the role of OPNFV going forward as networks evolve towards 5G and IoT.

 

When we released OPNFV Brahmaputra almost two months ago, we committed to delivering the entire set of deployment scenarios incrementally, with additional scenarios becoming available in a set of monthly stable releases (SR) as they achieve added stability. After further iterative work by our community it is with pleasure that I can announce we are now releasing a more complete and stable set of deployment scenarios, Brahmaputra 3.0, which is available today!

Specifically, Brahmaputra 3.0 includes key enhancements to SDN distributed routing, BGP VPN support, Service Function Chaining (SFC), and other Layer 3 infrastructure support. Much of this is addressed via the OPNFV “SDNVPN” project, which has reached deployment with Brahmaputra 3.0 SR.

Many telecom network functions are relying on Layer 3 infrastructure services, within a VNF between components, or towards existing external networks. In many cases, these external networks are implemented in MPLS/BGP technology in existing service provider wide-area-networks (WAN). This technology provides a proven mechanism for inter-operation of a NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and WAN.

This capability leverages a number of activities across OpenDaylight, OVS and OpenStack where we have been implementing components of the overall functionality, including OpenDaylight Project VPN Service; OpenStack Blueprint on Neutron API extension for BGPVPN; and OpenStack neutron project on BGPVPN.

The architecture in the VPN service proposal both links NFVI networking services seamlessly into the WAN network architecture, and provides a solution for distributed routing functionality in the virtual switches using standard ODL southbound interfaces.

The Brahmaputra 3.0 release additionally includes OVS enhancements; NFV targeted feature development in KVM and is the first release of OPNFV that runs with stability in our ARM labs.

The Brahmaputra 3.0 release provides our most stable and consumable release of Brahmaputra and further establishes a solid foundation for further development and end to end feature composition in the Colorado release.
About the author of this post

Chris Price
Chris leads open source industry collaboration for Ericsson in the areas of NFV, Cloud & SDN from the CTO’s office in Sweden and is an active member of the technical steering comitee’s of the OpenDaylight and OPNFV Projects.  Chris’ experiences include leading Ericssons’ IP&Broadband network architecture and standardization teams with a rich history in development of systems and technology in the areas of network management, policy control and user service management, user session control plane solutions, and DPI technologies.

The OPNFV community is comprised of a diverse set of active developers who are passionate about transforming the industry through open source NFV. This new blog series highlights the people who are collaborating in the trenches to build a de facto standard open source platform for NFV.

About Ildikó Váncsa

Ildikó is coordinating the OpenStack related activities at Ericsson and beyond this she is also working as a Software Developer. She is an active OPNFV contributor where her main focus is on the Promise and Doctor projects. She also contributes to OpenStack, mainly to the Nova and Ceilometer projects. Before Ericsson, Ildikó worked for OptXware Research and Development, Ltd. focusing on O&M, system management and virtualization.

What projects in OPNFV are you working on? Any new developments to share?

I mainly work on Promise, and to some extent I’m involved in Doctor as well.

Doctor is about improving fault management in the integrated platform. It targets OpenStack as the VIM focusing on 1) handling faults and 2) maintenance operations on the infrastructure layer. We improved the alarming component in the OpenStack Liberty release to support alarming on top of events. Aodh – the new alarming component in OpenStack – is now able to raise an alarm, for instance, when Nova emits a notification about an instance that went into an ERROR state. The new functionality is now available in the OPNFV Brahmaputra release as well. The team is also working to improve the feedback loop within OpenStack (for instance, you can now mark a compute service down in case of host failure, which brings a much faster reaction time to Nova). It is very interesting to see how the carrier-grade features are merging into OpenStack. The project is now focusing on addressing maintenance in the infrastructure.

Promise is focused on resource reservation. This is a requirement that comes form the operators; due to the limited amount of hardware resources available, scaling out on-demand is not always an option.

The project is evaluating two alternatives in parallel: the shim-layer and integrated approaches. The first one provides an API layer on top of OpenStack, which is responsible for both creating reservations and providing capacity management functionality. A basic set of the functionality is available in the Brahmaputra release of OPNFV. The team is now focusing more on the second alternative, which aims to integrate a solution into OpenStack. We are using the Blazar project as a base, which was created to provide resource reservation functionality in OpenStack; it is currently using the shelf API of Nova. We are following the activities around the Nova scheduler, as it is one of the building blocks of our planned architecture as well. Currently we are updating the code base of this module while also working on the long-term architecture of the integrated approach in parallel.

Where do you see OPNFV in five years?

To be honest, I try to keep myself back from making predictions. The overall IT industry, including telecom, is changing so rapidly that it’s really tough to tell where it will be in five years. I don’t even know where I will be in five weeks from now, not in five years! 🙂

Regarding OPNFV, I think we can bring speed into the telecom industry if we keep up with the current progress. Cloud and open source have turned things upside down in the IT industry already. The telco companies have their standardized processes and traditional ways of working, we were in a sleeping state a bit which started to change now and OPNFV can help much in this transition.

I hope OPNFV will not be a standalone community for long, but instead a thriving ecosystem with other upstream communities we’re trying to work together with. We’ll have a common roadmap, where NFV is taken into consideration. I also think that VNFs have to be designed in a cloud-aware manner, which will lead us to have a merging set of priorities in this big, common ecosystem. Most importantly I see OPNFV as the key in bringing all the pieces of the industry together into a big picture via the end-to-end integration and testing work we are doing.

One thing I’m sure of is that we still have plenty of work to do…

What is the biggest strength of the OPNFV community?

The biggest strength of OPNFV is the people, all the committers and contributors who are working hard to make this happen.

This community is full of motivated experts eager to make this community a success. OPNFV also provides a nice and friendly environment; people are very open and helpful. The fact that we already have our second release out also shows how dedicated people are in this community as the integration of all these components is not an easy puzzle to finish.

Due to the nature of the community, we are all trying to see the bigger picture. We also have very different viewpoints concentrated in one place by having service providers, vendors and IT companies on board. This mixture helps in finding the common language for the industry.

Do you have any advice for developers just starting out with OPNFV?

There are several parts of the development work which are less fun but not any less important. Don’t let things fall off the cliffs!

Always take a step back and try to imagine you’re the user of the features you’re working on. If you feel that you would not likely be the person to configure, use or troubleshoot the component you design and develop, then it is a sign to change it, even if that requires some sacrifices on the implementation side. Another important aspect is backward compatibility, which gets forgotten very often. It is very important to always see the big picture, including usability and quality!

What technology could you not live without?

I’m kind of in love with virtualization.

It was part of my studies at the university even before cloud became a big deal. I really, really like how much flexibility it can give you. It brings the utilization of hardware resources to another level.

Cloud technology lifted the whole thing even a level up, providing more flexibility and also more challenges; especially in the case of the telecom industry. We are moving to NFV and building telecom applications from VNFs, which can mean a full re-design in certain cases. This puts both the beauty and the beast in one box and it all becomes a balancing game, which provides many advantages by the end. I like that the technology we are building on opens up so many doors and gives so many possibilities.

What part of the world do you live in?

Hungary! I live in Budapest, the capital of the country, which is also pretty much the center of the country from a technology perspective; there are several multinational companies and more and more startups around. In the countryside, agriculture is still dominant. I like Budapest as it is a very vibrant city and it also has a nice view of the Danube. Basically it is the dream city of a hacker – lots of IT and cheap beer (although I’m more a wine person myself, which luckily is also available in good quantity)! I also encourage everyone who would like to visit as a tourist!

What do you when you’re not working?

I used to work as a bartender as a second shift, which was exhausting, but I liked it very much. I also enjoy cooking and baking, nowadays trying to figure out how to bake nice, not just tasty, macaroons! I like drawing as well, I plan to return to this hobby once and make it a larger part of my life than it is today.

 

OPNFV will host the first OPNFV Plugfest, May 9-13, at our CableLabs campus in Louisville, CO, and I couldn’t be more excited. This is where some of the initial conversations happened around forming OPNFV so it’s only fitting we leverage the CableLabs facilities to help OPNFV achieve this significant milestone.

OPNFV has grown dramatically from its inception with the goal of building a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform to accelerate NFV. From the initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture via the Arno release, and now more recently with Brahmaputra. This second release marks a significant milestone for the project–it’s lab-ready and brings rich platform-level testing of NFV functionality and use cases with enhanced stability, system and unit testing as well as integration and infrastructure documentation.

The Plugfest also represents another milestone: OPNFV users coming together with the sole purpose of improving the platform, in real time and with real hardware, software and applications. Plugfest participants will have access to OPNFV platforms via the community Pharos labs, but are also encouraged to bring their own hardware to the Plugfest site. This is an opportunity to experiment with products against the validation framework, try different VNFs in different scenarios and configurations, and work on interoperability and prototyping.

The three key areas of testing are:

• OPNFV deployment (integration with different hardware platforms and installers)
• Network integration (integrating the OPNFV platform with SDN controllers or other networking hardware)
• VNF applications (verification of app life cycle on OPNFV platforms, including deployments created by different installers).

Attending the Plugfest will be members from the OPNFV technical community, including key members of the five testing projects. But OPNFV membership is not required! The OPNFV Plugfest is open to members and non-members alike; in fact, we encourage participation from developers across different organizations to ensure a well-rounded set of perspectives. If there are things you’d like to see in the C release, we encourage you to show up, participate, and get things done!

If you’re interested in shaping the future of OPNFV, please join us in Louisville! Visit http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-plugfest to learn more and register.

About the author of this post
Tetsuya Nakamura
Tetsuya Nakamura is a Principal Systems Architect at CableLabs and member of the OPNFV Board of Directors.

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Today, we celebrate the second OPNFV platform release: Brahmaputra. I am so proud of the entire OPNFV community who have come together to create this incredibly rich and diverse experience that marks significant progress toward a deployable open source platform for NFV. It’s our first full experience with a massively parallel simultaneous release process and demonstrates that we can meet the complex challenge of collaborating upstream to advance the ecosystem. (Learn more about Brahmaputra here.)

Brahmaputra software delivers enhanced testing capabilities (system and performance), new deployment and integration scenarios (weaving in new controllers and installers), improved automation of our continuous integration and continuous deployment toolchain, and last (but not least) many new carrier-grade features (such as IPv6, , fault detection, resource reservation, and dataplane acceleration).

But what I’m most proud of is the growth and strength of our community: Systems integration is hard, requires diligent collaboration, and is essential in our march toward NFV viability. It’s been said before, but bears repeating: the strength of any open source project depends on the community involved in developing it.

What we’ve seen with Brahmaputra is key stakeholders collaborating across the industry and a marked increase in community engagement overall. For example, 35 projects were involved in the Brahmaputra release, compared to just five in Arno. That’s a six-fold increase in just ten months! Even more telling is the more than 140 developers involved in the release—which means we’ve seen developer participation in OPNFV as a whole increase five-fold since August of 2015.

But at the same time, so much of what we do is upstream collaboration, which has also grown in size and impact with Brahmaputra. A great deal of the effort going on behind the scenes is in working with other communities, including KVM, OVS, OpenStack, Linux kernel, OpenDaylight Project, ONOS, Open Contrail, ETSI, and IETF. If you think about how many developers across all these various organizations have contributed to the release, it’s a feat that could only be achieved through open source development.

Brahmaputra represents a significant milestone in project maturity. It’s now “lab-ready,” which means it provides a viable starting point for evolving NFV use cases (such as SFC and L3VPN) and composing services in an actual lab environment. It brings improvements to platform-level testing and project infrastructure, including framework and documentation updates that set the stage for further development of the platform, but also scenarios that can be tested now.

Brahmaputra’s continuous integration mechanisms provide a stable framework for deploying and testing new use cases across the extensive Pharos community labs, which played a pivotal role in the development of Brahmaputra as they were used for release validation along with the OPNFV bare metal lab hosted by the Linux Foundation.

OPNFV releases are centered around scenarios, i.e., compositions of components and their configuration as well as associated installation, integration and testing. Brahmaputra will deliver the entire set of deployment scenarios incrementally, with additional scenarios becoming available in a set of release editions as they achieve stability. Moving forward, we’ll continue to improve the platform tooling, enhance testing capabilities, and work with upstream communities to introduce new features.

I encourage you to get involved! Today you can download OPNFV Brahmaputra and if you’re a developer, join the mailing lists or weekly Technical Steering Committee (TSC) calls to help shape the direction of OPNFV. We’ll be hosting our first plugfest the week of May 9th at at the CableLabs headquarters in Louisville, CO, which will provide a great opportunity to collaborate and test interoperability of different products with the Brahmaputra release.

Comments from OPNFV Brahmaputra Developers

“I am proud of the Brahmaputra release for its lab-readiness–we will be able to develop innovative applications, experiment with new use cases and demonstrate the interoperability of the platform. I am particularly proud of the IPv6 feature in OPNFV, which extends the current capabilities of the Neutron Router and the ODL L3 Router to any VM that is managed by OPNFV and acts as an IPv6 vRouter. Thus, it allows flexible service design, provisioning and deployment on OPNFV.” –Bin Hu

“This release includes the results of the NFV feature development pipeline, which start from the real operator requirements and go through code development in the relevant upstream projects towards a reliable NFV platform, powered by open collaboration.” — Ryota Mibu, NEC/Doctor Lead

About the author of this post

Chris Price
Chris leads open source industry collaboration for Ericsson in the areas of NFV, Cloud & SDN from the CTO’s office in Sweden and is an active member of the technical steering comitee’s of the OpenDaylight and OPNFV Projects.  Chris’ experiences include leading Ericssons’ IP&Broadband network architecture and standardization teams with a rich history in development of systems and technology in the areas of network management, policy control and user service management, user session control plane solutions, and DPI technologies.

The OPNFV community is comprised of a diverse set of active developers who are passionate about transforming the industry through open source NFV. This new blog series highlights the people who are collaborating in the trenches to build a de facto standard open source platform for NFV.

Bin is currently a PMTS with AT&T focused on the company’s standardization strategy and activities in web domain and a core member of AT&T’s D2 Open Source Strategy team. He’s also a key advocate and participant in the OPNFV technical community.

What projects in OPNFV are you working on? Any new developments to share?
I am leading the IPv6-enabled OPNFV project, which is a meta-distribution of the platform with de-facto provisioning and configuration of IPv6, upon which additional components and functional blocks and/or tools can be built and integrated. We analyzed the gaps of IPv6 use case requirements vs the features currently supported in OpenStack and OpenDaylight, and extended the current capabilities of the Neutron Router and ODL L3 Router to a Service VM that acts as an IPv6 vRouter managed by the OPNFV platform. This Service VM is capable of (1) advertising IPv6 Router Advertisements (RA) to the VMs on the internal network; and (2) IPv6 Forwarding (i.e., North-South traffic). This novel use case expands IPv6 vRouter capability to any VM and allows for any third-party solution (e.g. IPv6 vRouter VNF) as an alternative to a Neutron Router or ODL Router. Thus, it allows flexible service design, provisioning and deployment on the OPNFV platform, and more importantly, it enables open innovation.

Anything specific you’re working on or looking forward to with Brahmaputra?
The IPv6 feature described above will be part of the Brahmaputra release.

Where do you see OPNFV in five years?
In five years, I would see that OPNFV will have achieved our 2020 Vision of network virtualization, and guess what? It is an OPNFV-based platform that makes it real. Whenever and wherever people talk about network function virtualization, OPNFV will be a no-brainer.

What is the biggest strength of the OPNFV community?
The biggest strength of the OPNFV community is its sense of community. In particular, the determination towards making a difference in the industry makes us grow strong and healthy within this community. We argue, and we debate, but only for the best of community because we care about delivering the best-in-class technology and a robust platform that enables new services and open innovation. We know that each stakeholder can win only when the community wins. So a strong, inclusive and healthy community is the key to everyone’s success.

How do you envision NFV and SDN working together?
NFV and SDN are two pillars of open innovation. They are complementary, and they are mutually beneficial but not dependent on each other. For example, NFV can be deployed without SDN and vice-versa. On one hand, NFV focuses on the platform, which leads to improved business agility and reduced time-to-market, and thus reduced TCO (CapEx and OpEx). On the other hand, SDN creates network abstractions to allow application-aware behaviour, and increased flexibility of service development and delivery, which leads to improved market penetration and expanded customer base, thus more revenue. We can see that NFV aligns closely with SDN objectives to use software, virtualization and IT orchestration and management techniques. Working together creates more opportunity for open innovation.

What is the biggest challenge facing networking today and how will NFV resolve it?
The biggest challenge of networking is how to improve its agility, how to reduce its time-to-market, and how to reduce TCO for network operators. NFV provides the answer, and OPNFV provides the real-world solution by making NFV and SDN work together and align closely with SDN objectives to use software, virtualization and IT orchestration and management techniques to allow for open innovation in telco space.

What types of customers/end users are mostly likely to implement NFV in the near future?
Network operators and service providers in both telco and IT are implementing NFV now.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?
Get your feet wet, break it and make it work.

What technology could you not live without?
I really wish I could live without any technology like 20 years ago. I am old-fashioned. I really like my family sitting around fireplace, chatting, eating, reading a real book and relaxing instead of watching an iPad or kindle or instant messaging at the dinner table.

What does your workspace look like?
Messy. Oh, the good thing (or bad thing) is I am next to the kitchen. So don’t watch me if I accidentally turn on video in conference calls J How messy? Just imagine.

What part of the world do you live in? 
I live in a small town named Los Altos in Silicon Valley. Los Altos means “the heights” or “foothill” in Spanish. It was an agricultural paradise once known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight”. It was famous for its apricot orchards in the Valley, and summer cottages for those living in San Francisco to spend summer here in the past. In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, along with others including Ronald Wayne, built the first 50 Apple I’s in Jobs’ garage in Los Altos. Jobs, Wozniak, and Wayne founded Apple Computer, Inc on April 1, 1976. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg rented a home in Los Altos where he and other early Facebook employees developed the then-nascent company.

By 2020 developers will rule the world. True or false?
Perhaps gadgets and robots – just kidding.