Highlights: OPNFV Mini Summit at NFV World Congress

It was great to be part of the inaugural NFV World Congress last week in San Jose. On Tuesday, we hosted an OPNFV mini-summit that was standing room only. After I provided an OPNFV overview, Dave Neary of Red Hat gave a presentation on the importance of open source, giving us a history lesson along the way. Chris Price, our TSC chair, gave a talk detailing the community’s vision for the initial release of OPNFV and beyond. He then chaired a service provider panel featuring Luigi Liccari from Telecom Italia, Chris Donley from CableLabs, and Byran Sullivan from AT&T. It was a bit of a change of pace to have a vendor put the operators in the hot seat, but they graciously provided insight into how they’re planning to roll out NFV and the challenges they see.

Frank Brockers, our BGS project lead, kicked off the afternoon getting more into the details of OPNFV and looking at OPNFV through the lens of open source system integration. Finally, we ended with a presentation explaining data plane acceleration and its importance in platform performance co-authored by Keith Wiles from Intel and Bob Monkman from ARM.

The presenters all did an excellent job, and the audience was very engaged with questions throughout the day. It was great being able to share information about the project with the larger industry! It was also great seeing two PoCs from AT&T featuring OPNFV, and many other members were on hand with cool NFV demos. There were also plenty of informal dinners and hallway discussions about the project — it’s fantastic to see how much excitement and enthusiasm the topic is creating amongst operators and vendors alike.

Our next event is geared toward the technical community — we’re holding an OPNFV Day at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. We’re going to give an overview of OPNFV, look at some of projects and see a demo featuring developing code in action. In the afternoon we’ll be doing breakout hands-on working sessions where we hope to generate some good technical collaboration among our community and the OpenStack technical community.

Whether it’s at one of our events, reaching out on forums or mailing lists, or getting involved in a technical project, we invite you to join OPNFV!