Blog

By Tim Irnich, Chair, OPNFV Technical Steering Committee and Program Manager, Cloud, Open Source & Ecosystem at Ericsson

Today, the Fraser release goes live. It’s an important milestone for OPNFV, and I would like to sincerely thank all contributors, PTLs and working group facilitators, TSC members, Linux Foundation staff and all other supporters for the tremendous effort, creativity, enthusiasm and skill that went into the release.

Fraser Highlights

OPNFV is a large and diverse project and it is impossible to list all achievements in one blog post. But just to mention a few highlights, Fraser provides a significant step towards more mature cloud native support, higher platform maturity by enhancing features like telemetry and high availability, more robust networking capabilities and various forms of data plane acceleration, and also significantly advanced–and in some cases introduced–entirely new test methodologies and tools. As with previous OPNFV releases, Fraser integrates and verifies lots of updated and upgraded upstream components like OpenStack Pike, ODL Oxygen, FD.io release 18.01, and Kubernetes 1.9, only to mention a few. We have also made significant progress with our range of artifacts and services targeting developers by providing easily deployable, flexibly composable, and up-to-date platforms that can be used as comprehensive yet accessible development and testing environments.

The adoption of cloud native in OPNFV, in terms of creating reference stacks based on Kubernetes and integrating them with other related components, as well as the related enhancements to our CI and testing infrastructure, started some time ago. The Fraser release denotes a significant step forward in this effort. For example, we now have 8 different deployment scenarios across various installers that integrate Kubernetes and related components and tools, and Kubernetes support has been added to both Functest and Yardstick test frameworks.

Advances in testing include increased test coverage; for example in the areas of high availability and long term stability, better usability through lower execution times and additional traffic generators,  and better consumability through separating generic framework components from OPNFV-specific code. Based on the observation that the OPNFV test frameworks and the underlying infrastructure for test data collection and analytics is a useful asset also for other projects, the Functest team has introduced a clean separation between test framework and the related packaging mechanisms on the one side and OPNFV test cases on the other side. This allows cross-community testing where the Functest test framework, test results API and database backend, and visualization dashboards can be used by other projects within LFN and beyond. This has seen immediate adoption in ONAP with the interesting side effect that a 100MB container could replace the 1GB VM that was used previously, and reusing  the remaining OPNFV CI pipeline becomes very simple. Another noteworthy enhancement is that VSPERF added new tests to measure data plane performance in “noisy neighbor” situations–an effect known to cause significant performance degradations in suboptimally configured systems.

Further enhancements highlighting the growing maturity of the OPNFV reference platform are infrastructure maintenance and upgrade with zero VNF downtime, new and updated collectd plugins data collection plugins including DPDK and OVS stats & events, an SNMP agent,  IPMI events and many more. The Calipso project provides networking discovery, visualization, monitoring and analysis in Kubernetes and has added support for Contiv/VPP and Flannel in Fraser. The SDNVPN project has added support for Equal Cost Multipath routing (ECMP) in order to overcome the bottleneck of using a single VxLAN tunnel between datacenter edge and fabric.

Developers Tools

Our Cross-community CI (XCI) initiative is becoming more mature and has seen a boost in adoption by other projects during the Fraser release. It now supports multiple scenarios and a number of OPNFV features like BGPVPN, Service Function Chaining and Kubernetes have been integrated. We have also seen other installer toolchains like Apex adopting the XCI concept.  

We have launched our Lab-as-a-Service offering (available at http://labs.opnfv.org), which takes this concept behind XCI to the next level by providing free access to hardware resources and pre-provisioned stacks, saving community developers of OPNFV and other projects significant time and effort and enabling them to dedicate significantly more time to things that actually matter to them. We are continuing to work on this and will have even more information to share in the coming months.

Moreover, with Fraser, the vision towards dynamic continuous integration (CI) got a boost with the introduction of Scenario Descriptor File (SDF), Pod Descriptor File (PDF), and Installer Descriptor File (IDF) specifications, which contain machine readable information to enable OPNFV installers to deploy any OPNFV scenario to any Pharos lab. With these descriptor files, CI jobs can dynamically run on any available hardware as long as the SDF and IDF requirements match PDF capabilities. The concept will roll out in several phases over the summer.

Looking Ahead

We’ll put the Fraser release to the test in June at the Fraser Plugfest co-located with ETSI at their facilities in Sophia Antipolis, France and are already several milestones into Gambia where we will add a CD-based release process. Cloud native and edge computing will further advance through collaboration with upstream components in CNCF, updated lab specifications in Pharos suitable for edge computing along with new projects requirements, upstream development, and end-to-end testing and integration.

At 3 ½ years in, OPNFV is certainly growing more and more mature in its core deliverables whole at the same time looking ahead and addressing new use cases like Cloud Native and Edge Computing. Participation and adoption by end users like China Mobile and Orange further defines the important role OPNFV is playing in the industry. I hope you’ll join us!

By Ray Paik, OPNFV Senior Program Manager, The Linux Foundation

The fourth OPNFV Plugfest, hosted by Intel at their Jones Farm Campus outside of Portland, OR was held on December 4-8, 2017. Intel has been a key contributor to OPNFV since the project launch and their hospitality was certainly appreciated by everyone attending the event. It was also great to see Intel’s Pharos PODs up close as they have been a great resource for the OPNFV community. There were 104 attendees (up 20% from last time), from 30 organizations that included 6 end-users and 6 non-member companies.

There were a lot of OPNFV deployment/testing of the latest Euphrates release on a variety of hardware platforms (3 on-site + 7 remote), finding/fixing bugs, VNF Onboarding, cross-community CI (XCI), SFC, the testing projects, and more. There were also many parallel sessions as the community continues their work on the upcoming OPNFV Fraser release and discussions on improvement areas for OPNFV such as documentation, release process, user support, etc.

With each Plugfest, I continue to be impressed with community’s dedication, passion, and collaborative culture. The presence of multiple project technical leads (PTLs) and key

stakeholders helped accelerate progress significantly and I was amazed at what the community accomplished in 5 days. The next Plugfest will be a co-located event with ETSI at their campus in Sophia Antipolis, France on June 4-8, 2018. Stay tuned for more details!

For more details on outcomes from the OPNFV Euphrates Plugfest, I encourage you to read the Plugfest Report.

By Chris Donley, Sr Director, Open Source Ecosystems, Huawei; Chair, OPNFV Certification & Compliance Committee

As we kick off 2018, the OPNFV Compliance & Certification committee—the members driven body within OPNFV that defines recommendations to the Board for policies and oversight for compliance and certification—is pleased to announce the launch of the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP). The program is designed to simplify adoption of NFV in commercial products by establishing an industry threshold based on OPNFV releases. The fact we are using an open source platform as referent to measure compliance of commercial products—not necessarily based on its source code—is a new and innovative step for the industry.

The OPNFV Verified Program facilitates both vendor self-testing and third-party lab testing using the Dovetail test suite. In our initial version, we will be testing NFV infrastructure components: NFVI and VIM. In the future, we may expand the program to cover VNFs and other components, as well. In December, just ahead of the launch, we conducted a “beta program” with several vendors: Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, and ZTE. These companies provided valuable feedback while we refined and finalized the program. They also represent the first cohort to received the privilege of using the OPNFV Verified mark and logo. Congratulations to these companies and we welcome additional members of the open NFV ecosystem to join us!

OPNFV Verified Program is designed to help operators establish entry criteria for their trials and RFPs. We have worked closely with end user advisor operators to establish a framework and an initial bar to support their requirements. The program will also reduce operator testing load by identifying a set of common tests and executing them just once under the auspices of the OPNFV Verified Program, rather than many times in many labs. As OPNFV and the industry at large continue to mature, we will steadily raise the bar in future versions as to what becomes verified. We expect two OPNFV Verified versions per year, denoted with the month and the year to make it easy to identify the compliance level of submitted products.

Under the auspices of The Linux Foundation, we are well positioned to expand the program to support other projects in the future. Prior to the official launch, we initiated discussions with related projects on leveraging the program to support the wider open source community. OPNFV’s C&C, the group responsible for chartering the OPNFV Verified Program, is also exploring additional operator use cases that can be incorporated into the compliance test suite.

I am excited about the launch of the OPNFV Verified Program and I hope you will join us in 2018! To operators, I invite you to share your use cases and functional requirements, and please consider incorporating OPNFV Verified into your RFP process or lab trials. To vendors, I hope you’ll download the Dovetail tool and test your commercial offerings. If you’re looking for assistance, several third-party labs are eager to help. Learn more about the OPNFV Verified Program and get started today!

Please direct any questions you may have to verified@opnfv.org.

Read the full 2017 OPNFV Year in Review report here.

It is with gratitude and pleasure that I look back on our accomplishments of 2017 and with excitement for the future as I look ahead to our path as part of LF Networking in 2018. We have come such a long way together since our founding over three years ago and this moment of transition marks a great opportunity to reflect on our impact.

Starting with the unique mission to do systems integration as an open source project, we have become the engine room for integration, testing, and automation, and new NFV feature validation across the open source development ecosystem. What I am most proud of is the strong and collaborative relationships we have built with our key upstream partners, from OpenStack to OpenDaylight to Kubernetes, to data plane and acceleration groups like FD.io and DPDK, to hardware partners like Open Compute Project. 2017 also saw us incorporating MANO and analytics capabilities with ONAP, Open Baton, PNDA, and Calipso.

This work would not be possible without our extraordinary community and its welcoming global culture. This year saw two productive plugfests, hosted by Orange and Intel, the continuing growth of the XCI initiative, our Danube and Euphrates releases, and an extraordinary OPNFV Summit hosted in Beijing. We presented at Open Source Leadership Summit, ONS, China SDN/NFV, OpenStack, Light Reading’s Big Communications Event, and CableLabs Summer conference. We built our first ever community demo showing an integrated stack for the Virtual Central Office, and are about to launch our long-awaited OPNFV Verified Program.

Most importantly, we made friends, we shared beers, we debated, we worked to make our community more inclusive, we solved technical problems, and we reached out to forge ties across multiple communities. As we look forward to being part of LF Networking this year, I know that we will bring this spirit of working together to help all our networking projects bring value and change the world in 2018. Let’s go collaborate!

In the interim, I encourage you to download the full OPNFV 2017 Year in Review report for a more holistic look at what we’ve accomplished this past year.

OPNFV interns Shrenik Jain and Aakash Kt had the opportunity to attend the recent Euphrates Plugfest, held at the Intel campus in Hillsboro, Oregon, December 5-9.  We had the chance to sit down and chat with them about their experience at Plugfest and also learn what it’s like to intern with OPNFV.

Click below to watch the interview:

If you are interested in becoming an OPNFV intern, please email internship@opnfv.org 

This post intially published to The New Stack

By: Jehanne Savi, executive, All IT Strategic Programs, Orange

By Sandra Rivera, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Network Platforms Group, Intel Corporation

From December 4th through the 8^th, Intel will host the OPNFV Euphrates Plugfest at its Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. We are excited to support the OPNFV developer community in this fourth Plugfest, see familiar faces and welcome new members to the community. Intel has been involved with the OPNFV since its inception, and we continue to support its mission to create a standard NFV reference architecture, developed through system level integration, deployment and testing across open source ecosystems.

During the Euphrates Plugfest, community members including project technical leads (PTLs), and software developers will tackle the technical challenges of putting Euphrates release into operation. Attendees will improve the OPNFV platform through rigorous compatibility testing across multiple hardware and software configurations, including the latest platforms based on Intel architecture built on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable family of processors. Developers and vendors can try new scenarios, test cases, installers, tools and combinations of components.

Advantech, Nokia and Intel will provide onsite hardware resources, and CENGN, Lenovo and NEC will provide remote equipment, including OCP-based servers.

OPNFV Projects Meetings, Concurrent Hacking Session

New areas of focus for this Plugfest include collaboration with ETSI on its upcoming PlugTest test cases; ONAP integration, Kubernetes and container integration, and multi-access Edge. You can learn more about the previous Plugfest by reading the Danube Plugfest report.

We also have plans for key project teams to meet face-to-face. Doctor, Clover (Cloud Native NFV), Yardstick, Bottlenecks, Daisy, SNAPS-OO and other teams will meet for in-depth discussions, problem-solving, and planning for the upcoming Fraser release.

Due to overwhelming demand from previous Plugfests, we will also host several hacking sessions.

While the agenda is still under development, you can stay up to date on the latest schedule by visiting the Plugfest collaboration wiki page.

Intel Network Builders Ecosystem and Network Services Benchmarking project

The Intel Network Builders ecosystem is comprised of independent software vendors (ISVs), operating system vendors (OSVs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs), system integrators, communication service providers and other industry leaders focused on creating reference architectures and new use cases to accelerate the adoption and deployment of NFV and SDN.

The Intel Network Builders community has tested new concepts and contributed many innovations to open source communities, including OPNFV. One recent example is the Network Services Benchmarking (NSB) project launched over a year ago to develop a common testing framework for Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) characterization. The goal of NSB is to accelerate the VNF onboarding process, a key requirement as we prepare the infrastructure for 5G.

This benchmarking program has led to significant contributions to the Yardstick, Barometer and SampleVNF sub-projects in support of the latest Euphrates release. You can read more about NSB in a recent blog by John Healy, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter Network Solutions Group.

OPNFV Members, Non-Members and Intel Network Builders: Register for Plugfest Today

I encourage you to join us in Hillsboro December 4-8. Test the Euphrates release, expand your industry network, and build on your NFV skills. Space is limited and spots are filling up – so register today. We look forward to seeing you there!

This post originally appeared on the DARPA Hackfest blog. 

This post first appeared on Linux.com

By Amar Kapadia

In this article series, we have been discussing the Understanding OPNFV book. Previously, we talked about chapters 1-5 via an introduction to network functions virtualization (NFV), the role of OPNFV in network transformation, and how OPNFV integrates and enhances upstream projects. We continue our series with a look at chapters 6 and 7, that provide in-depth insight into the OPNFV DevOps toolchain, hardware labs, continuous integration (CI) pipeline and deployment tools (installers).

As mentioned previously, OPNFV integrates a number of upstream projects along with code contributions from the OPNFV community. To integrate and test these projects and contributions in an automated manner, the OPNFV project uses a variety of DevOps tools, hardware labs and a sophisticated CI pipeline. In fact, there is no better way for a telecom operator to absorb the principles of DevOps than by joining OPNFV.

Chapter 6 of the book starts by discussing each of the various software and cloud-based tools used by OPNFV for DevOps:

• Collaboration: JIRA/Confluence
• Source code management and code review: Git, Gerrit, and GitHub
• CI/software automation: Jenkins
• Artifact repository: Google cloud storage and Docker hub

Here is an excerpt from the book discussing Gerrit:

Code Reviews – Gerrit

Committing to master requires an approval process, and this process is managed through a tool called Gerrit. Gerrit is an open source web-based code review tool developed by Google. All changes pushed by contributors using a git push or git review command are reviewed in Gerrit by a set of reviewers, who view and inspect the patch. Reviewers also get to see the results of a continuous integration (CI) build and automated verify test run. Reviewers provide scores of +2, +1, -1 or -2. A +2 is a definite accept, while a -2 is a definite reject. A +1 or -1 may result in the change being accepted, rejected or sent back for changes.

OPNFV Gerrit

The chapter then describes the hardware labs used for automated integration and testing jobs. OPNFV has defined a standardized set of hardware, called a Pharos lab, consisting of 6 nodes and associated switches to automatically deploy OPNFV software by using the CI pipeline. The Pharos lab concept has been very successful with 16 labs distributed all around the world working seamlessly.

Chapter 6 continues by describing the CI pipeline in detail, where changes in upstream projects or community code contributions trigger integration jobs and specific time-durations (such as daily, weekly) trigger testing jobs. The CI pipeline diagram from the book is shown below:

Chapter 7 start by exploring the concept of OPNFV scenarios. Since OPNFV allows for multiple choices for different software layers, numerous permutations are possible. In addition to the different upstream projects described in the previous blog, OPNFV also allows for diversity in installers. The list of scenarios represents a subset of all possible permutations; effectively each scenario is a tested reference architecture. Examples of scenarios are:

• OpenStack + ODL + L3 FD.io + High Availability (HA) using the Apex installer, or
• OpenStack + OpenContrail + HA using the JOID installer

The OPNFV Danube release had 55 scenarios. However, if we ignore non-HA scenarios and the specific installer used, we are down to 21 distinct usable scenarios.

The chapter continues by providing an overview of the 4 major installers used in the Danube release: Apex, Compass, Fuel and JOID, and ends with a discussion of additional deployment related projects such as Daisy (a new installer), IPv6, Parser, ARMBand (to run OPNFV on ARM) and FastDataStacks (FD.io with OPNFV).

Want to learn more? You can check out the previous blog post that discussed the broader NFV transformation complexities  and how OPNFV solves an important piece of the puzzle, download the Understanding OPNFV ebook in PDF (in English or Chinese), or order a printed version on Amazon.

By Tapio Tallgren

Three years after its founding, OPNFV has carved out a solid niche in the industry as an NFV center of gravity, as an integrator of upstream projects, and as the standard software testing platform. OPNFV Euphrates, the project’s fifth platform release, demonstrates the hard work and industry collaboration of the vibrant OPNFV community that continues to advance open source NFV through containers, improved testing, new features, and deep community collaboration.

The journey towards container integration is one of the biggest changes coming to NFV, and Euphrates begins to take these steps for OPNFV. The way I tell NFV history is that it started by moving network elements to virtual machines (VMs). Then integration of the cloud infrastructure removed the need to know exactly where the VM was running, and enabled more automation. However, the network elements (Virtualized Network Functions or VNFs) have evolved to remove the dependencies on emulating hardware. Thus, the software can now run in containers, which are much lighter than VMs. This in turn enables new innovations that will change the actual software architecture since the overhead of a container is so small, each process can be broken out into its own container. The innovation opportunity that containers create for open source networking is profound.

Improved testing seems to be a recurring highlight of each OPNFV release and the integration and testing effort has made significant progress in providing an extensive set of tools to test the NFV cloud, VNFs, and complete network services. New projects—including Sample VNF, which provides testing of the VIM/NFVI layer with applications approximating real-life application workloads; and NFVBench, which provides an end-to-end dataplane benchmarking framework—have been introduced. Additionally, existing test projects have continued to evolve with new features, capabilities, and test cases.

OPNFV also continues to develop carrier grade features for the industry as shown by the new Calipso project which provides operational visibility into complex virtual networks. Euphrates also includes performance improvements, better security, and additional choice in the stack.

One of the most important attributes of OPNFV is integration and collaboration. To demonstrate how OPNFV collaborates with upstream projects, OPNFV has introduced the cross-community continuous integration initiative, or “XCI.” This takes the latest and greatest software releases from different upstream communities, tests them in the OPNFV setup, and provides feedback to the community—quickly. Thus, an OpenStack developer can find out if a patch she is about to create will make something break when integrated with the latest OpenDaylight release, running on a platform with the VPP virtual switch from the FD.io project, for example. (Learn more about the XCI initiative in this recent blog post from key members of the OPNFV community.)

Looking ahead, planning is already underway for the next release—OPNFV Fraser (named for the Fraser river in British Columbia, Canada) and the projects that will be part of it are already signing up! And we’re holding our fourth OPNFV Plugfest in the early December to test and try to break the Euphrates release with different hardware setups, and to give the OPNFV project members a chance to plan the work ahead. I invite you to join us in Portland, Oregon.

As a further sign of OPNFV’s maturity, the OPNFV Compliance and Verification (CVP) is now under beta testing. CVP will help enhance interoperability, build the market for OPNFV-based infrastructure and applications designed to run on that infrastructure, while reducing adoption risks and testing costs for end users.

All of these improvements to the OPNFV platform have (and do require) required tremendous effort from across the community. Please see the section below to hear what Euphrates means to some of our core upstream communities. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in OPNFV for contributing to the Euphrates release, and beyond!

Comments From Upstream Communities

FD.io
“In addition to participation in XCI efforts, OPNFV Euphrates leverages the latest enhancements from FD.io 17.04, and performs continuous integration against the upcoming 17.10 master branch. VPP supports IP multicasting, Enhanced NAT, security groups, IOAM, LISP, and scalable packet filtering, in addition to numerous other features,” said Ed Warnicke, FD.io Technical Steering Committee chair and distinguished consulting engineer in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office (CTAO) at Cisco Systems. “OPNFV Euphrates also takes advantage of FD.io’s strong performance gains in Layer 3 performance.”

Kubernetes
“It’s exciting to see Kubernetes and cloud native technology being adopted into the NFV space,” said Chris Aniszczyk, chief operating officer, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “For example, OPNFV Euphrates introduces the notion of containerized VNFs which will enhance performance, while also supporting OPNFV’s evolving DevOps processes.”

OpenBaton
“With Euphrates, OPNFV makes an additional important step towards a more comprehensive reference platform for accelerating the adoption of NFV and SDN technologies,” said Giuseppe Carella, project manager, Open Baton and OPNFV Orchestra project project technical lead. “We are proud of having introduced the first OPNFV scenario integrating a full MANO stack provided by the Open Baton project, leveraging the JOID installer. Moreover, functest has been extended for validating such integration using vIMS VNF packages available on the Open Baton marketplace.”

OpenStack
“The strong collaboration between the OpenStack and OPNFV communities delivers greater agility, performance and value for carriers and service providers building next-generation open networking stacks,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “OPNFV’s Euphrates release supports containerized OpenStack via the Kolla project, and it gives users the improved performance and functionality found in OpenStack’s 15th release, Ocata. Euphrates is proof that when open source communities work together, users win.”

OpenDaylight
“OpenDaylight continues to integrate closely with OPNFV,” said Phil Robb, vice president of Operations, Networking & Orchestration, The Linux Foundation, and executive director, OpenDaylight. “As an upstream contributor to OPNFV Euphrates, ODL Carbon and Nitrogen bring enhanced stability, performance, security and network programmability features to the open source networking stack.”