OPNFV formed almost two years ago with the intention of developing carrier networking needs for virtualization as a collaborative activity across a variety of open source communities. This week, the OPNFV community makes its third release available, not to great fanfare and excitement but to the quiet knowledge that now really getting down to business and delivering value into the open source ecosystem.
The Colorado release lays the foundation for OPNFV to address carrier application and service integration. The platform itself offers needed functions like service chaining, enhanced VPN support at Layer 2 and 3 with BGP peering, and event notification needed for a number of key carrier and enterprise applications and use cases. These capabilities are not unique; it is in the ability to interact with, and rely on, these capabilities in an end- to-end ubiquitous platform that OPNFV brings real value to the industry.
The fact the OPNFV community delivered the Colorado release on the exact date planned is no accident. The constant and pervasive desire to optimize and automate every aspect of virtualization software development and integration is at the heart of this feat. The Infrastructure Working Group and Testing Working Group have established cutting-edge CI/CD and validation capabilities that enable our community to build, integrate and validate over 50 platform compositions many thousands of times per release.
One of the key areas of concern often discussed, but rarely addressed, in the virtualization space is security. Throughout the Colorado release process, the OPNFV Security Working Group have demonstrated that addressing security is not only a concern, but a set of concrete actions for all of us. The team achieved the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) badge for best practices around security in open source development. In addition, our security processes and procedures were tested out only days before our release when a vulnerability was reported and successfully addressed in time for the release.
Finally, I would conclude that while OPNFV is fundamentally about the industry and ecosystem, it does not exist on its own; rather, it works across the industry to solve complicated problems. In Colorado, for instance, this can be seen via:
- The ability to deploy most OPNFV features and services on both x86 and ARM architectures
- The adoption and integration of fd.io forwarding in the OPNFV platform within six months of the project forming
- Establishment of a number of MANO integration projects to address application onboarding and carrier use cases in the upcoming Danube release
The pace our community has set in these first formative years– and the proven ability to deliver and prove technologies and concepts– establishes OPNFV as a community who are able to collaboratively address broad needs with other with concise actions. With this as an operational tenant for OPNFV, I believe the community will continue to break down barriers and deliver value to the industry, for the industry, for a long time yet.
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.