OPNFV was launched in 2014 to become the “glue” that knit together the diverse piece parts needed for network functions virtualization to work. With its Danube release, the open source group hits a major milestone in fulfilling that promise, delivering what it calls “a full next-gen networking stack” in one open collaborative environment with a cohesive approach to testing and deployment.
Read more at Light Reading.
OPNFV ‘Danube’ demonstrates ‘create, compose, deploy, test, iterate’ playbook to enable state-of-the-art open source NFV
SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Open Networking Summit—April 4, 2017 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of OPNFV Danube, the project’s fourth platform release. As the demand for more robust and agile networks increases, more organizations are looking to technologies such as NFV to bring the scale and flexibility of cloud architecture to networking. The only platform that builds and integrates elements—including functional support for Management and Orchestration (MANO)—across multiple end-to-end open networking stacks, OPNFV Danube introduces key architectural components and evolutionary improvements that meet the needs of end users to enable accelerated NFV.
“Danube represents an evolutionary turning point for OPNFV,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “It brings together full next-gen networking stacks in an open, collaborative environment. By harnessing work with upstream communities into an open, iterative testing and deployment domain, we’re delivering the capabilities that truly enable NFV, and that is very powerful.”
OPNFV Danube brings DevOps methodologies to NFV via collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and significant Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) testing automation. Danube also includes continued incremental improvements in baseline features, new advances in network control capabilities, and a growing focus on performance-related topics—especially NFV data plane performance, and instrumentation around MANO functions. With these updates, OPNFV empowers next-generation networking for NFV.
Key enhancements available in OPNFV Danube include:
“We’re seeing the culmination of over two years’ of collaborative work from across the community really come together with the release of OPNFV Danube,” said Tapio Tallgren, lead software architect in Mobile Networks Architecture & Technology, Nokia, and chair of the OPNFV Technical Steering Committee (TSC). “Things like real foundational support for MANO, OPNFV’s sophisticated testing, and DevOps and CI/CD model propel the project into a more robust industry platform for advanced open source NFV.”
Looking ahead, the next OPNFV release, labelled ‘Euphrates,’ will include even more vigorous features and capabilities. For example, the community will be expanding MANO support via collaboration with ONAP to integrate the ECOMP and Open-O code base as it matures, the cross-community CI/CD model will be enhanced, and the platform will include a focus on VNF interoperability and application enablement. OPNFV will also continue to improve native support for LXC/LXD and Kubernetes. Additionally, the project will be building out analytics capabilities through integration with both the PNDA and ONAP projects.
Information about OPNFV Danube is available here: https://www.opnfv.org/software. For information on how to participate in the OPNFV project, visit: https://www.opnfv.org.
Comments From End Users
CableLabs®
“The OPNFV Danube release is an important milestone,” said Tetsuya Nakamura, principal architect, Strategy and Innovation Group, CableLabs. “The strong integration testing enables us to utilize Danube as the basis for our NFV/SDN R&D reference platform, which we plan to use to accelerate cable industry test cases such as virtualized cable access provisioning through our subsidiary Kyrio’s interoperability lab.”
Orange
“We are looking forward to the Danube release and have started integrating the new Danube DevOps methodologies and overall OPNFV testing components into our integration center, leveraging OPNFV as a key component of our NFV platform,” said Emmanuel Bidet, vice president, Convergent Networks Control, Orange. “We have high expectations of Danube as the fourth OPNFV release, and are happy to welcome the community for release testing during the next OPNFV Plugfest, which we’ll be hosting at the Orange Gardens near Paris, at end of April.”
Telecom Italia
“OPNFV plays a key role in the telco software-centric network transformation by rapidly building an open and integrated foundation, collaboratively working with upstream communities,” said Cecilia Corbi, senior project manager, Standard Coordination & Industry Influencing Technology department, Telecom Italia. “The Danube release represents a relevant milestone for the maturity and robustness of the platform by including advanced features and scenarios that accelerate development of NFV applications and services. Via a strong focus on continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD) and testing, coupled with many capabilities that enable network flexibility and agility, OPNFV has become an asset for telco operators as they transform their networks.”
OPNFV is onsite at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. this week, participating in various presentations and demos throughout the Summit. Learn more about OPNFV participation at ONS throughout the week.
The third OPNFV Plugfest will be held April 24-28 at the campus of member company Orange in Chatillon, France. The event will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in three key areas of testing: OPNFV Deployment, Network Integration, and VNF Applications. Both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend.
OPNFV is hosting its third OPNFV Summit in Beijing, China (June 12-15). The event will feature both a Design Summit—where the OPNFV technical community will convene to continue working on the E-Release with plenary sessions, project breakouts, and social events—and a Summit Conference with keynotes, breakout sessions, a technology showcase, networking opportunities, and much more. More details on sponsorship, attendance and registration are available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit
About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)
Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. For more information, please visit http://www.opnfv.org.
OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.
Additional Resources
Get Involved
Download OPNFV Danube
OPNFV Resources
OPNFV Blog
By Tapio Tallgren
The OPNFV community has achieved another milestone: its fourth release, Danube. I’d like to extend a big “thank you” to everyone who contributed to the release! Although the community is continuously iterating on OPNFV projects throughout the year, the release itself marks a special occasion: it is the moment when our create-compose-deploy-test-iterate playbook comes to fruition and we take a moment to share our progress with the world.
For me, the Danube release represents a state of maturity for OPNFV. A clear indication of this is the new test results dashboard: testresults.opnfv.org/reporting. Here, anyone can check the testing status of any OPNFV scenario across multiple OPNFV releases with just a few clicks. This provides an easy and accessible view of potential error logs, in real time, so any issues can be quickly addressed. Another mark of the project’s maturity is the growing number of OPNFV feature projects that make valuable contributions upstream. For example, the Doctor project implements host management to OpenStack, while the Service Function Chaining (SFC) project works in tandem with OpenDaylight’s SFC project, OpenStack’s Tacker, and OpenvSwitch. The purpose of OPNFV was not to create a separate platform for NFV, but to integrate NFV functionalities across the stack while identifying gaps—a role that, with Danube, is clearly taking shape.
From the beginning, the OPNFV project has featured multiple installers, which makes sense given the varied backgrounds of the community—we could not pick just one Linux distribution, and we did not want to pick a single SDN controller. However, the goal is to automate both the testing process and the process by which we work with upstream communities as much as possible, thereby ensuring faster and more agile development. One example of how we’re marching towards increased automation is the creation of a pod descriptors template. This means that a lab owner can write a single document for each pod that describes its configurations: what IP addresses should be used, what interfaces are reserved for what purposes, etc. So any OPNFV deployment will one day be able to use this description and install the OPNFV platform on the pod. This means that different installers can be deployed in a matter of hours, enabling a “Lab-as-a-Service”.
We’re also working to streamline how we work upstream. If there is a change in OpenStack or OpenDaylight or FD.io (for example) that might pass its respective upstream tests but cause a failure in an OPNFV deployment, we want to flag that as early as possible. Bugs are easier to catch when they are new.
While installation and testing are key tenets of the Danube release, there are other enhancements worth mentioning. One new experimental functionality is Gluon, which is about redesigning OpenStack networking. The scope of OPNFV is also expanding into the Management and Orchestration (MANO) space, with Open-O (now ONAP) and OpenStack Tacker part of some MANO-related OPNFV scenarios.
You can find more technical details about what’s included in OPNFV Danube on the OPNFV software page, in the press release, and on the wiki.
We’re already hard at work on the next OPNFV release: Euphrates, as we gear up for our annual OPNFV Summit, which will be held (fittingly) on the same continent as the Euphrates, in Beijing June 12-15.
In the interim, you can join the community for the Danube Plugfest, April 24-28, hosted by Orange at their Paris facilities. Here, the community can come together to test the release with different installers and hardware combinations. We’ll also have a strong presence at the OpenStack Summit in Boston in May. Be sure to visit the Events page on our website to stay up-to-date on OPNFV activities across the globe.
By Guest Blogger Randy Levensalor, Lead Architect, Business Technologies, CableLabs
This post first published on the CableLabs blog.
In a previous blog, I have provided an overview of the SNAPS platform which is CableLabs’ SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack project. The key objectives for SNAPS are to make it much easier for NFV vendors to on-board their applications, provide transparent APIs for various kinds of infrastructure and reduce the complexity of integration testing.
I am thrilled to share our latest SNAPS success. We have written an OpenStack API abstraction library that also contains many automated tests and we have contributed it to the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project at the Linux Foundation. OPNFV is a project where service providers and network vendors collaborate to improve the capabilities and adoption of open source Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Our results have also been shared at NFV World Congress, SDN World Congress, OPNFV Summit [video], Open Networking Summit (ONS) [video] [pdf] and the Big Communications Event (BCE).
The Rationale for our Approach
CableLabs has deep expertise developing specifications by following a collaborative, iterative approach. In many ways, the open source software development process mirrors many of these specification development processes. In the open source communities, CableLabs provides source code and feedback coming from our integration and debugging activity. In fact, CableLabs contributions are included in key open source projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight. In this way, we are making it easier for vendors to use open source projects to build solutions for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
We have generated practical knowledge and insights through our hands-on experience of building and operating an active SDN/NFV application development lab. And we took vendor neutrality to the next level by basing our software stack on purely open source solutions and based on the OPNFV reference configuration. We did not use versions of OpenStack, OpenDaylight, etc. that have been tested and customized by a vendor. This allowed us to interact with a much larger community for new features and fixes.
The CableLabs team, supported by vendors and services providers, has moved our project into OPNFV as “SNAPS-OO”, based on the idea that it is an Object Oriented way to work with our SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack. The project was quickly accepted and is now being used by the release testing team to verify each OPNFV build. With the integration of SNAPS-OO into the OPNFV FuncTest project, our contributions are now part of the release criteria and suite of tests that will be used at the upcoming OPNFV PlugFest next month.
Some of the benefits that SNAPS-OO delivers are:
As a result of this open source approach, and in just a few weeks since SNAPS-OO was released, we have seen a significant increase in the level of contributions and adoption.
Next Steps
How SNAPS-OO Benefits Our Membership
SNAPS-OO is helping to improve the quality of the open source projects associated with the NFV infrastructure and Virtualization Infrastructure Managers that many members are using today and plan to use in the future. SNAPS-OO can be used to validate that the infrastructure is installed properly and it will be playing a key role in the Kyrio NFV Interoperability lab. Future NFV development provided by vendors will benefit from the use of SNAPS-OO. With the variety of workloads that we will be running on our SNAPS platform, we will be able to specify a single configuration that can run future NFV workloads alongside other cloud hosted applications.
We kicked off our intern program last summer and are pleased to have welcomed an amazing group of young talent! They work directly with the community and receive hands-on development experience in NFV. Each intern works closely with an active OPNFV developer as their mentor on a project that suited interest and community need. This blog series aims to showcase these interns and the projects they work on, the mentors who are helping with their professional development, and their experience working in an open source community to help accelerate NFV.
About Rohit (in his own words):
I am a fourth-year undergraduate student at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India. My interests are in distributing systems and networking. In my free time, I like to explore new things as well as new places and I really love to play badminton, football and obviously Counter Strike GO.
How did you hear about OPNFV and what got you interested in this internship?
I was an OpenDaylight intern and was able to attend the OpenDaylight Summit in Seattle last year. That is where I learned about OPNFV and its internship program; I found an OPNFV project similar to what I was doing with OpenDaylight and it’s going very well so far! I am very glad to be participating in this internship.
Can you talk about your experience working on an open source project? Any previous experiences you can share or key learnings from working on OPNFV so far?
Working with an open source project is a wonderful experience indeed. I’ve been able to learn about new technologies. Working with open source projects is a great opportunity to write and contribute to the creation of industry standards programs. I am fortunate to have this experience when in college; in my both internships, community members have been very encouraging and that has boosted me up many times and empowered me to do more work. 🙂
What’s the best thing you’ve learned from your internship?
The best thing I have learned from this internship is how to effectively communicate and discuss the pros and cons of a solution among the community, and then feeling empowered to go ahead and move forward with a solution. Being passionate and working hard are two big takeaways for me.
Who is your mentor and what’s the experience been like?
My mentor is Serena Feng and she is really cool. We not only talk about the code, but we chit chat about the differences in our cultures (she is Chinese) and also we agree on many common aspects. I ping her a lot in IRC and she never gets angry and clears my doubts very patiently. I am glad to have a mentor like her.
What’s your advice to other aspiring open source folks out there?
There are many open source projects in the world. Just ping in IRC or send an email expressing your interest in a project and there will be many replies! Open source communities are very helpful, and always willing to address questions or talk through issues. It is a great opportunity to contribute to tech and can bring immense satisfaction.
What gets you jazzed to work with open source? (e.g., listening to music, drinking coffee, chatting in IRC, etc.)?
Chatting in IRC, especially using irssi. I love command line, and irssi doesn’t have any GUI. The perl scripts you write to get a notification when your mentor comes online. Code review is another awesome thing which I really like…getting +2 …being merged. 😛 (And obviously sometimes -1 :/ )
Being in open source allows you to work from anywhere in the world and interact with lots of different people. What have you found most surprising about the open source developer community?
Yes, interaction with lots of different people is definitely a new experience. It actually helps me learn about different work cultures and different ways of approaching solutions, which broadens one’s knowledge. But frankly, I find it very difficult that everyone is not online at one time. I sometimes have to wait a whole day to get a reply 😛
What do you want to do next? What is your dream job?
I don’t have a dream job, per se. But I would like to work more on distributed systems and the networking domain. In general, I love taking on challenging work, like designing new algorithms/architecture stuff.
By Brady Johnson (Ericsson) and Prithiv Mohan (Intel)
OPNFV recently had a chance to participate in the first ETSI NFV Plugtests, held January 23-February 3 in Madrid, Spain. As the first-ever ETSI NFV Plugtests, the goal of the event was a coming together of MANO, VNF and NFV platform (VIM & NFVi) providers to perform ETSI NFV interoperability testing among different vendors and open source providers.
Together with Prithiv from Intel, Ericsson colleagues Juanma Fernandez and Juan Vidal, we were able to represent two OPNFV pods (one indirectly OpenDaylight), which was one of four supporting open source projects, as an NFV platform. Ericsson provided a virtualized OPNFV Service Function Chaining (SFC) Colorado deployment using the Fuel installer. This deployment used an OpenDaylight (Boron) SDN controller as a Neutron back-end. Intel similarly brought in an OPNFV Colorado release environment with OpenStack Mitaka managed by an Apex installer. In Intel’s setup, OpenStack’s Neutron was used as the SDN controller.
Ericsson were pleased to report that they executed 18 successful, approved test sessions with OPNFV in just under 10 days and Intel were pleased to report 14. (It should be noted that, for a test session report to be “approved,” it needed to be performed by a MANO provider with a VNF on a particular VIM & NFVi. All three parties—the MANO, VNF and VIM & NFVI providers—must approve the report to merit successful completion.) The OPNFV test sessions run by Ericsson included five different MANO providers and 11 different VNF providers. Those run by Intel included six MANO vendors and 12 VNF vendors.
The deployments consisted of:
Ericsson is very happy with the outcome of the testing completed during the event, clearly highlighting and demonstrating the value of OPNFV community efforts in NFV. We are eager to engage further in future Plugtests and similar events to address additional areas we were unable to dive into during these two weeks. For example, there were two additional tests focused on specific hardware capabilities that we weren’t able to execute due to incompatibilities of our virtualized system, and we attempted to run an OPNFV SFC deployment with one more VNF but did not have the time. In the future, we will invest further into establishing a longer pre-testing phase allowing us to prepare the proper configuration, any needed workarounds, and have additional discussions with VNF vendors supporting SFC.
Intel had very successful Plugtests as well. Each test session was done with one MANO vendor and one or two VNF vendors at the same time. The MANO provider changed every day and the test sessions continued with a different set of VNF vendors. The Intel OPNFV-based environment was so stable that at one point during the busy schedule, there were four MANO solutions and five VNF providers on-boarded at the same time and running tests in parallel.
All in all, it was a successful 10 days and we’re very happy with what was accomplished. This has been a great achievement for the OPNFV project, since it demonstrates maturity of the OPNFV platform, which is now ready for complex deployments. Moreover, it is a clear demonstration that open source MANO projects are ready to integrate with OPNFV, although there is still work to be done when it comes to more advanced use cases such as SFC. Additionally, Ericsson was approached by several VNF providers who asked for help with side testing –a testament to our streamlined process.
A final thought: as these interoperability tests are complementary to OPNFV integration tests conducted during our own OPNFV Plugfests, there’s an even more seamless opportunity for OPNFV to be involved in future ETSI Plugtests.
A special thank you to the extended Intel and Ericsson teams representing OPNFV: Adrian Hoban, Jack Morgan, Trevor Cooper, Ross Brattain and Sibai Li from Intel; and Juan Vidal, Juanma Fernandez, Nikolas Hermanns, Fatih Degirmenci, Jose Lausuch, Harshad Tanna, and Ernest Bayha from Ericsson.
Stay tuned for more information on OPNFV’s evolving testing efforts.
Heather Kirksey likes to call them as she sees them.
As director for Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) — a role she alternatively describes as coach, nerd matchmaker and diplomat — she oversees and provides guidance for all aspects of the project, from technology to community and marketing.
Read more at Superuser.
The Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) is driven more by iterative code releases than by heavyweight up-front standardization efforts.
Read more at opensource.com.
LAKE TAHOE, California — The OPNFV open source group has released the report for its second plugfest, conducted in December. The plugfest was notable for testing OPNFV software on Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware designs. Lenovo and Nokia provided the OCP hardware, including servers and switches, for the tests.
Read more at SDx Central.
We kicked off our intern program a few months back and are pleased to welcome our first group of OPNFV interns! They work directly with the community and receive hands-on development experience in NFV. Each intern works closely with an active OPNFV developer as their mentor on a project that suited interest and community need. This blog series aims to showcase these interns and the projects they work on, the mentors who are helping with their professional development, and their experience working in an open source community to help accelerate NFV.
About Shubham (in his own words):
I’m a senior year undergrad at IIIT Hyderabad, India. I’m working on the Ontology of the Indian Patent System, under Professors Navjyoti Singh and Snehal Awate of the Indian School of Business on predicting the premium value of stock in merger scenarios.
I’m hugely fascinated by Yanni and his music. I hope someday, whatever I’m into gives me the engagement, vigor and passion about life and work as his music does to him and so many others like me.
How did you hear about OPNFV and what got you interested in this internship?
I heard about OPNFV from a friend who is also interning with the project. A major reason for me jumping into OPNFV is the long-term value this platform can create for the industry. It’s a huge opportunity to be a part of a project that, in near future, has the potential to change the methods of traditional networking domains.
Can you talk about your experience working on an open source project? Any previous experiences you can share or key learnings from working on OPNFV so far?
Prior to OPNFV, I had contributed to a few open source projects as part of my attempt at Google Summer of Code. However, this is my first mainstream and long- term work with open source.
A key learning following the team mails and discussions lists, is the amazing ability of developers scattered in different parts of the world to meaningfully engage and leverage each other’s skillsets to build such a radical technology as OPNFV.
What’s the best thing you’ve learned from your internship?
The best thing I’ve learned is how to communicate unambiguously. When I initially started, I spent quite a bit of time ensuring that everyone was on the same page. Putting forth your ideas without having an iota of assumptions was a major skill to learn. There are so many points which we take for granted as understood. When communicating with teams from different parts of the world, each working on a different aspect of the project, it is necessary to be able to explain ideas such that there is no scope for ambiguity.
This isn’t just a project skill; it’s also a valuable interpersonal skill needed to work in a global, virtual environment. To be effective, it is important that the person is able to grasp the context of what you’re communicating and not just the content.
Who is your mentor and what’s the experience been like?
My primary mentor is Sofia Wallin. Trevor Bramwell and Christopher Price are my co-mentors. It’s been great working with them. Each of them are very understanding and have very graciously responded to all my questions and corrected my mistakes. My training literally started with Trevor telling me how to post commit messages. It’s wonderful to be learning about the community and the platform from everyone on the team. In addition, Sofia’s leaderships skills are inspiring; her diligence, patience and conduct makes me strive to do better on the project.
What’s your advice to other aspiring open source folks out there?
Just jump in. Pick up whatever you don’t know. There is never an “ideal” time.
What gets you jazzed to work with open source? (e.g., listening to music, drinking coffee, chatting in IRC, etc.)?
Definitely music.
What do you want to do next? What is your dream job?
After this internship, I’ll be focusing on finishing my research. I’m still figuring out what my dream job is. Anything done long enough starts becoming a drudgery. I’d like to keep my mind (and maybe my job) moving with opportunities and fascinations at different stages of my career. I’d be keen to find transdisciplinary opportunities pivoted around Software engineering roles but not limited to them.
