John Healy, General Manager, Software Defined Networking Division, Datacenter Solutions Group at Intel, will deliver a keynote at the Berlin OPNFV Summit. Prior to the event, we engaged with John to get his thoughts on the latest developments and future direction for the community project.
How do you see the OPNFV community progressing towards interoperability testing?
With the Brahmaputra release, the OPNFV community converged on building out the test infrastructure for the Network Functions Virtualization infrastructure (NFVi). One of the key proof points showcasing progress was delivered during the OPNFV plugfest earlier in May, where within a few weeks of the commercial release of Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4, OPNFV members were successfully able to run the Brahmaputra release.
In addition, multiple contributors are building out the test framework for integrating various different SDN controllers into the NFVi stack through the Yardstick project. Other new projects such as Dovetail are being formed for the Colorado OPNFV release to create scenario-based testing environments to more closely emulate real-world Communications Service Provider deployments. The combination of all of these activities represents very tangible and very exciting progress towards testing NFV interoperability.
Are you seeing the OPNFV community contribute to other upstream open community projects? In other words, does OPNFV’s midstream integration work?
Absolutely, and the approach is becoming more mature with every release. For example, there are a number of contributions to OpenStack from OPNFV to provide guidance and input on how to enable carrier-grade service assurance in the NFVi. This creates a continuous collaboration loop between OPNFV and upstream open source communities focusing on SDN and NFV. This collaboration also extends to OpenDaylight where multiple OPNFV projects such as Doctor, Promise, Escalator, Cperf and IPv6 are also working together on blueprints and code.
Is there enough momentum across the different OPNFV projects to sustain future releases?
As every other open source project, we can always use more contributors to the different OPNFV projects. With two major releases, and the next release (Colorado) well on its way, I believe that the OPNFV community is proving its value to the Communications Service Providers by building out an open, efficient and innovative supply chain ecosystem for NFV solutions.