In 2014, the widespread interest in creating a platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) was evident across all sectors. NFV is moving out of the labs and into the field. A recent study by Infonetics predicts that the SDN and NFV markets are expected to exceed $11 billion by 2018. We’re excited to see the industry embrace open source as the way to bring NFV to market faster.
The OPNFV Project was launched at the end of September with the intention of creating an open source reference platform for NFV. The number and diversity of the member companies supporting the project is a validation of the high level of hope on open source as the preferred delivery method for a de facto standard NFV platform. Since the launch, the OPNFV community has been growing steadily with the addition of five new member companies bringing the total to 44.
The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) reviewed 33 project ideas at its first HackFest during the first week after launch, many of which are being formally adopted into OPNFV as TSC approved projects. The OPNFV community has agreed to focus on the establishment of our integration and baseline platform during formation, while establishing several NFV-related projects expecting to deliver into the second release of 2015. To this end the community and TSC have been busy reviewing and approving several of the projects and establishing methodologies for community collaboration. Oh, and our software release names will be river-themed.
We also gathered in force at OpenStack Summit in November where we invested time meeting the OpenStack community and finding ways to collaborate on feature development and testing. Cross community collaboration is a key focus area for 2015 with the OPNFV community looking to invest in and providing value both to our user and developer communities.
The community is excited about taking the ideas to the next step in 2015. The team has plans to collaborate at the following events — a Meet-up at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, February 19-20 at Santa Rosa, Calif, and Hackfests around ETSI NFV#9 in Prague, February 23-24, and the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, May 18-22. See the latest Hackfests and Meet-ups schedule here.
The belief that many minds are better than one is the driving force behind open source. It’s your code, ideas and feedback that will make open source NFV a reality. The community is excited about taking the ideas to the next step in 2015. We invite you to get involved as we collaborate to deliver the industry’s first open source reference platform for NFV in 2015!
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.