opnfv

NFV is picking up steam as more telecom and enterprise network operators recognize the scalability and flexibility of controlling their network functions via open source software and commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Operators are realizing that achieving rapid time-to-market for NFV systems requires a carrier-grade, end-to-end testing and integration platform such as OPNFV.

Open source cloud computing platform provider Openstack is investing heavily in NFV. In fact, OpenStack just released a white paper on NFV entitled “Accelerating NFV Delivery with OpenStack” that describes NFV and its business value in detail, and explains how OpenStack supports NFV and integrates with OPNFV. Drawing on the experience of several enterprise and carrier organizations—such as AT&T, Verizon, SK Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and Bloomberg—the white paper investigates specific use cases via real-world implementations of NFV with OpenStack, and explains how OpenStack and OPNFV are working in concert to define and support NFV deployments.

OPNFV, which provides a common integration and testing platform to facilitate NFV deployments, and defines a consistent, functional stack that developers are adopting as a de facto standard, is cited in the paper as a critical catalyst for the adoption of NFV. In the upcoming Brahmaputra release, which integrates OpenStack Liberty as the VIM, OPNFV will look to provide lab-readiness for testing and interoperability of NFV functionality and use cases. OPNFV has also contributed developers and code upstream to accelerate the features in OpenStack. Learn more about the integration between OPNFV projects like Doctor and Multisite, with upstream projects such as Nova and Cinder among several others on the OPNFV OpenStack Community page.

The white paper also investigates the role of SDN within NFV, telecom requirements for NFV with OpenStack, MANO, and what’s ahead for NFV. To learn more about OpenStack’s approach to NFV and how OPNFV and OpenStack work together, visit https://www.openstack.org/nfv/ to read the full paper.

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 Maryam Tahhan

Maryam Tahhan is a Network Software Engineer at Intel Corporation. Her focus for the last few years has been on virtual switching, virtual switch performance and enabling service assurance features in DPDK. She leads 2 OPNFV projects: VSPERF and SFQM. Maryam is a sports fanatic, from rugby to hurling and even the martial arts, she’ll try/watch any sport (at least once).

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

I lead 2 OPNFV projects, the first is Software Fastpath service Quality Metrics (SFQM) which aims to enable service assurance features in DPDK, such as telemetry and fault detection. Our latest feature, DPDK Keep Alive (silent drop detection on DPDK cores), was released as part of DPDK 2.2 earlier this week and we are currently integrating the features we are working on with Monasca. The second project I work on is Characterize vSwitch Performance for Telco NFV Use Cases, a.k.a VSPERF. VSPERF aims to define, implement and carry out a suitable test suite for benchmarking the performance of virtual switches to help understand where vSwitches can reside in deployments. We’re really looking forward to releasing the VSPERF framework as part of OPNFV release B and publishing the results for the benchmarks we are running on stock OVS and OVS with DPDK to the OPNFV test dashboard.

Where do you see OPNFV in five years?

In 5 years’ time I see OPNFV as “The” mature reference telco-grade NFV platform for telcos. The rate of progress since the start of OPNFV and the fact that its inaugural summit saw more than 700 attendees are testament to the interest and attention the industry is paying to OPNFV. This, in combination with the admirable work ethic of the OPNFV committers and contributors, the TSC and all involved, will ensure its success in achieving this goal, or at the very least, give it a real run for its money.

What is the biggest strength of the OPNFV community?

I think the biggest strength of the OPNFV community is our sense of community, camaraderie, and friendliness to new-comers. The community’s work ethic, its willingness to stand together in difficult times and its enthusiasm to dive in and help out with any questions or issues that other community members might have are our key strong points.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

If you really believe in something and want to see it succeed, be committed, not just involved. Roll up your sleeves and get stuck in, and never go on a solo run, consult the community early and often.

What technology could you not live without?

Funnily enough, I would say my tablet; I’m an enthusiastic imgurian and need my fix of laughs every evening :$

What part of the world do you live in?

I live in the mid-west of Ireland in a city called Limerick. It’s a small city with a great atmosphere, from the sports-crazy friendly locals, to the thriving music scene, bustling restaurants and the picturesque villages, there’s always something to do. As home of the Cranberries, the music scene in Limerick is absolutely buzzing, with bands (rock, pop, even classical and traditional Irish music) coming to play the concert hall or the Big Top/ Dolan’s warehouse. Limerick is renowned for its sporting history, its home to Munster Rugby, and its legendary grounds, Thomond Park, which hosted its historic victory over the All Blacks in 1978. The locals are always out and about and their passion for sports can be seen through their continuous involvement and support for all sports, be it Gaelic football, hurling, golf, horse racing, soccer or cycling. If you need to get out of the city and enjoy some more rural views, the country side is but a 20min drive away, or if you prefer the beach (yes we have beach going weather ;)) is about 50 mins away.

By 2020 developers will rule the world. True or false?

True? Sudo make me a sandwich…

The OPNFV community is hard at work on our second release, Brahmaputra, planned for February 2016. We’ve just hit Milestone D, which means the release is API and feature-complete! As we work to finalize the release, we wanted to provide a quick sneak peek into what’s ahead.

For Brahmaputra we are aiming to have a lab-ready release of the platform which means a focus on further stability of the deployment, new features, projects and enhanced documentation. It should serve not only as a stepping stone for users to begin to familiarize themselves with the platform and start with early development and testing, but it will bring additional use cases and functionality useful for network operators. A great example of this is the beginnings of Service Function Chaining via the SFC project, as well as integration with Open vSwitch, and KVM for NFV, among others.

Specific highlights of what you can expect to see in Brahmaputra include:

• More projects! While Arno featured a total of five participating projects, Brahmaputra is looking at close to 40! For a list of participating projects and activities in Brahmaputra look no further than here.
• Support for more SDN controllers. Brahmaputra will support additional SDN controllers, including ONOSFW and OpenContrail in addition to OpenDaylight from Arno.
• Added installers. Installer technologies continue to be an area of growth and exploration for the datacenter.  By providing technology choices like Compass, TripleO, Juju and Fuel, the OPNFV community is able to work with activities and exploration in areas such as automated deployment and management of OpenStack and other distributed systems. The community offers needed capabilities to the OPNFV Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline to support flexible OPNFV platform deployments.
• Support for ARM-based servers. The Armband project is designed to simply integrate and test Brahmaputra on ARM-based servers. The goal is to replicate an OPNFV software build, Continuous Integration, lab provisioning, and testing processes so Brahmaputra can be available on both x86 and ARM architecture-based servers.
• Increased community lab infrastructure. Our community testbed labs, the Pharos Community Labs project, continues to grow! We’re currently at 10 functional labs across the globe, with more in the works. For Brahmaputra, Pharos Community Labs will also be used for release testing in addition to the OPNFV hardware at the Linux Foundation.

We can’t wait to see where the community takes this next release as we get closer to advancing open source NFV!  More details on the Brahmaputra release plan are available here, and check back often for updates.

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.

OPNFV was started with the broad goal to create an open source, carrier grade platform for NFV and to accelerate the adoption of NFV products and services. In just one year, we’ve grown to 55 members and shipped our first release, Arno, with the commitment and support from individuals representing a broad range of industries, company types and areas of interest. In order to move with greater velocity, the OPNFV Board of Directors made a recommendation to the community that we focus our initial efforts to the NFVI and VIM capabilities of an NFV platform, as defined by ETSI.  This approach has applied to our Arno release as well as the upcoming Brahmaputra release.
The open source and networking industries themselves are continually evolving, and the way in which OPNFV looks to address market needs will also evolve over time, calling on the same agility required of the platform itself. In taking a broad look at how the industry is advancing around NFV and the growing interest and work on the topic of Management and Orchestration (MANO), our Board recently decided to lift any initial scope constraints that may have previously limited OPNFV activities.
This means that OPNFV projects can expand, as needed, and the community is free to incubate and propose projects on additional topics, including MANO. This decision does not affect the project bylaws, TSC charter, or the upcoming Brahmaputra release, expected February 2016. Any project proposals related to MANO-type functionality will go through the same incubation and approval process as all projects to date.

We welcome interested parties to follow the OPNFV project pipeline, propose new projects, participate in the technical community discussions, and make contributions to realize the goal of accelerating NFV products and services. I invite you to join our efforts!

About the author of this post

Heather Kirksey
Heather Kirksey is the director of NFV leading initiatives around the OPNFV project.

Having just hit the one-year mark, we wanted to get a sense of how we’re doing from perspective of the telecom industry. So we commissioned Heavy Reading to conduct a global survey across its extensive database of telco and service provider professionals to gauge perceptions of OPNFV’s impact in shaping the rise of NFV.

With over 200 respondents spanning North America, Europe and Asia, the majority of telecom pros surveyed agree that OPNFV will help accelerate the adoption of NFV overall. Data looked at the drivers, barriers, timelines and key upstream integration needed for the project’s success.

Highlights from the data include:

•      86 percent of respondents agreed OPNFV is poised to accelerate NFV adoption overall
•      Swimming upstream and integrating with other open source projects is very important
•      Competing agendas and cross-company alignment are potential barriers
•      While the majority of respondents are actively exploring NFV, deployments are still young
•      Key success criteria include security, VNF interoperability, as well as management and orchestration

Overall, the data is encouraging and we’re excited to take on the challenges ahead as we collaborate towards an integrated, open platform for NFV.

Read Roz Roseboro’s blog post on Heavy Reading for more details on the survey findings and methodology.

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 Peter Lee

Peter Lee leads R&D at ClearPath Networks where he is responsible for driving technology innovation and strategic vision across the company’s products and services. He is also serving as project lead for OPNFV Promise project dealing with Resource Management for the Virtualized Infrastructure. He is the primary developer for YangForge model-driven open-source framework and serving as project lead on YANG enablement for ON.LAB XOS/ONOS projects. He is an avid practitioner of pragmatic programming principles and a strong advocate of open source development and open standards-based initiatives. Peter holds B.S. degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering from Duke University.

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

I’m currently leading the OPNFV Promise project and committer to IPv6, MOVIE, and Doctor. The Promise project was initiated just after OPNFV was introduced and addresses the ETSI NFV use case requirements around Resource Reservation for Future Usage. We’ve worked closely with the ETSI NFV IFA working group (many of our project members active in both organizations) and received strong collaboration from NTT-DOCOMO, NEC, Ericsson, and AT&T – just to name a few participating organizations.

During the upcoming OPNFV Summit, the OPNFV Promise project team will be demonstrating our first implementation, which will showcase live integration with multiple OpenStack environments for providing active capacity awareness, planning future capacity increase/decrease, reserving resources for future utilization, and allocating resources based on reservations.

During the Summit, we will also provide an in-depth overview of the underlying YANG Model-Driven framework (YangForge) which ClearPath open-sourced back in July.  The YangForge framework powers the Promise implementation and provides a rich abstraction for YANG-driven NB interface generation for CLI, REST/JSON, as well as web sockets.

Where do you see OPNFV in five years?

Within five years, I believe that OPNFV will successfully deliver a NFV platform that will be deployed by many communications service providers around the globe.  We will be actively working on a number of new use cases including service federation across clouds, along with the next generation real-time resource and service exchange systems.  With the emergence of Personal Clouds, OPNFV will be focusing on enhancing per-subscriber networking experience for the users, while addressing geo-political concerns around data privacy, lawful intercepts and other transport related challenges as the network boundaries become blurred into a series of dynamically created service paths across carriers.

What is the biggest challenge facing networking today and how do you see NFV helping to resolve it?

The networking industry today faces a significant challenge in recruiting and growing software development talent. With so much competition from the mobile, social, and other web-centric industries, our industry needs to focus on highly targeted developer outreach programs (into external development ecosystems) to spread awareness of recent developments within the networking industry while specifically highlighting the new monetization opportunities. I believe that the NFV movement captures the key ingredients for opening up the software development ecosystem as we usher in the next generation of marketplace-driven networking apps to become the new currency for delivering services to end users running directly on the carrier networks.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature.”–C.A.R. Hoare

The above observation has provided foundational guidance throughout my software development career. I always strive to identify the primitive logical constructs that succinctly expresses the desired solution, give it a whirl, attack the underlying implicit assumptions, then try again until further decomposition is no longer practical.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on design over implementation is often at odds with many recent trends in software development methodologies where quantitative progress is being championed over qualitative progress (which is inherently much more difficult to measure). Open Reference Platforms such as OPNFV provide the testing grounds for newly emerging paradigms in model-driven and functional software construction that serve to shift the focus back on design along with a new trajectory for collaborative innovation.