opnfv

By Sandra Rivera, Vice President and General Manager, Network Platforms Group at Intel Corporation, and OPNFV Marketing Committee Chair

During the recent OPNFV Summit in Beijing, we announced the results of our third Heavy Reading survey, aimed at gauging value of OPNFV as well as the state of NFV deployments among global communications service providers (CSPs). The highlights of the findings are provided in slides, which were presented by Heavy Reading analyst Roz Roseboro in a session during the event, but we would like to provide some additional insight into what we’re seeing this year as the industry evolves.  

Digging deeper into the survey data  was telling: While the importance of OPNFV to CSPs overall has increased over the past year, it’s become even more important for those organizations with NFV already in production—70% of those surveyed, in fact. And most of those with NFV in production (86%), are actively following OPNFV, with many (64%) contributing to the project. Note: more than half of all contributors work at companies with NFV in production. Importantly, nearly a third of CSPs with NFV in production have plans to adopt an OPNFV stack as part of their NFV architecture. This tells us is that the work we’re doing is valuable and is being used in commercial solutions across the globe.

Evidence of this is also seen in a shifting interest in NFV technologies (particularly open sourced) that goes beyond software and into hardware. The Open Compute Project (OCP), which aims to apply the benefits of open source to hardware, ranked as the most  important upstream project to the OPNFV community (in addition to OpenStack and SDN controllers). This signifies a turning point; it’s an indication that NFV is getting closer to deployment as CSPs acknowledge the importance of open source hardware designs to the success of NFV implementation. This also means that the efforts we’ve made in the OPNFV community to work more closely with OCP over the past year, are paying off. In fact, OPNFV was successfully deployed on OCP hardware for the first time during our Colorado Plugfest last December held at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Labs. To that end, OCP has a strong role in the full end-to-end open source network stack, which was discussed at the Big Communications Event in Austin as part of our OPNFV workshop earlier this year.  

The survey data also reaffirms another key aspect of OPNFV: DevOps. It’s still in the early stages, but DevOps will play a critical role in the success of NFV and this is recognized by 80% of the CSPs we surveyed, with several are either already evaluating various toolchains or working on automation and testing infrastructure. The numbers of those currently building Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) pipelines, or pushing out daily automated patches is lower, but recognition of the importance of DevOps and the role it will play to create a truly integrated pipeline for NFV is encouraging.

All in all, we see the steady adoption of NFV across CSP networks.  Our community is making meaningful strides as an integral player in accelerating the deployment and commercialization of NFV solutions in the market, enabled by the innovation and commitment of our growing community and our upstream integration partners. You can access the Heavy Reading survey slide presentation here, and view Roz’s session video from the Beijing OPNFV Summit here.

By Wenjing Chu, Distinguished Engineer and Senior Director of Open Source and Standards at Huawei

In the late 80’s, I was a college student studying computer science in the northwestern suburb of Beijing, where horse driven carts could still be seen on the quiet streets and most of the city’s residents commuted via bikes and buses. The city’s transformation since then has been unprecedented and astonishing. This phenomenal development has been credited by many economists to the simple fact that ideas and products produced by one group of creative people can be used by other groups around the world with minimal friction. When a good idea becomes a common platform, it taps into an ecosystem’s power of creativity, efficiency and economies of scale. It was therefore quite fitting that the OPNFV community recently gathered in Beijing for the third-annual OPNFV Summit.

Recognizing the importance of a common platform based on open source technologies, the OPNFV Board of Directors began discussions to define a compliance testing program not long after the project’s formation. Soon after, the Dovetail project was started to implement and realize such a program by leveraging the entire OPNFV community’s efforts in many fronts, including infrastructure, testing and feature projects. The goal of OPNFV compliance testing is to reduce adoption risk of commercial OPNFV-based infrastructure by decreasing complexity and cost of testing product capabilities and interoperability. 

Formation of the CVP

In December of 2016, the Board of Directors approved the Compliance Verification Program (CVP) Guidelines as a governance document outlining strategy and the overall scope. At the Beijing Summit, the OPNFV community announced to the public   the CVP and our intent to launch the program in the second half of 2017. Through this program, products will obtain OPNFV compliance verification signifying that the product:

• Supports key behaviors, functions, and related APIs of the OPNFV release
• Implements certain mandatory and optional NFV functions
• Supports interoperability between an infrastructure built on the compliant products and applications designed to run on that infrastructure
• Is a good candidate for more extensive testing by the operator for further trials in an operator network

Verified products submitted by respective vendors are expected to differentiate themselves with extra features and capabilities, better performance, or nicer user interfaces,  but remain compliant by implementing explicitly defined interfaces, behaviors, and key features.

The First CVP Test Suite: Based on Dovetail 

As an open source community-driven project, the test scope and automation toolset will evolve over time by contributions from the active OPNFV and upstream communities, with crucial requirements and feedback from many of the world’s service providers, standardization organizations and other end users. The Dovetail project leverages the prior work from a wide range of community projects, including Openstack refstack; OPNFV Pharos; OPNFV testing projects Functest and Yardstick; OPNFV feature projects HA, IPv6, and SDNVPN; and the entire OPNFV community through their work creating and testing scenarios that produce diverse configurations. The first release of the CVP test suite is being developed based on features and interfaces found in Danube and previous releases. Currently, it covers:

• Cloud capabilities
• VNF lifecycle basic functions
• Carrier network capabilities
• Service availability

The CVP envisions that applicants can use the toolset developed in the Dovetail project to self-test or to utilize the service of third-party testing organizations that use the Dovetail toolset. These processes and guidelines are also under development by the community. 

OPNFV Delivers Common Test  Methodology

Vendors–even if their products are based on open source–all use different versions and configurations in a plethora of combinations. This diverse and complex set of differing configurations seen across the industry can be problematic and is often seen as impeding the adoption of open source based solutions in NFV. The OPNFV community is actively working with service providers to bring a common test methodology and test automation toolset, and a common reference validation set, for evaluating suitability of commercial products from service provider lab testing. This is the vision we’re working to realize through the Compliance Verification Program.

For all in the community, from vendors, to service providers, to end users, we invite you to learn more about the CVP and the Dovetail project that is driving its implementation, and invite you to contribute to this community effort. This is an excellent opportunity to help define the test cases that are most valuable to you.  A Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. Today, our community is making this important first step towards our shared success in NFV.

For information on how to join this effort, please reach out to info@opnfv.org and watch the below presentation from OPNFV Summit: “Introducing the OPNFV Compliance Verification Program.”