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By OPNFV Ambassador and community members, Morgan Richomme & Xiaolong Kong

The third edition of the OPNFV Plugfest, jointly organized by OPNFV and Orange, was held at the Orange Gardens, the eco-campus of Orange just outside of Paris, April 24-28.2017. The first OPNFV Plugfest to take place outside of the United States, it brought together around 100 developers and network architects from over 30 partner organizations from across Europe, Asia and North America. We were proud that Orange could host the third edition of the OPNFV plugfest end of April. As a Service provider, actively contributing to OPNFV, managing two Pharos Community Labs, it was a natural fit to host such event.

Plugfests follow the Aristotelian rules of drama: unity of action, of time and of place, and as such, are an incredible humane catalyst for the community. Being able to discuss with all the actors (installers, testing, infrastructure, features) in one place during one week prevents months of complex interoperability tests or remote discussions.

As with previous Plugfests, several activities were done in parallel: bugs were reported; solutions installed on new hardware; tests executed both on-site and on remote systems. Open Compute Project (OCP) and smart NIC activities were especially interesting, associating OPNFV with cutting-edge hardware solutions. MANO was officially introduced into OPNFV Danube (via Heat, Cloudify, Tacker, Open-O, OpenBaton). The cross-sessions with ONAP were useful to prepare OPNFV Euphrates and position OPNFV as a target infrastructure to deploy and evaluate orchestrator function, mainly through future cross CI activities.

OPNFV Plugfest is also the right place to meet people and evaluate new concepts: power consumption prototype was shared with the community, encouraging the developer to go further and leverage the Pharos Labs federation to collect more information.

Paradoxically, I think that one of the main outcomes of this Plugfest is related to the fact  that we were able to break the system. Stress tests have been introduced in OPNFV Danube and clearly identified some limitations on OPNFV, but also commercial solutions. The capability to identify such problems, to reproduce them, is crucial to evolve towards a real carrier-grade solution. In addition to destructive stress tests, the ability to set up a realistic load test campaign using a commercial virtual loader on a virtual IMS also indicated a better level of maturity of the ecosystem. 

The biggest takeaway is that Plugfest provides additional evidence that OPNFV continues to make real progress.  Despite its relatively informal atmosphere as compared to traditional and complementary interoperability events, I think the week was too short for most of the participants. We may also note Plugfests now attract a new type of actor, which includes non OPNFV members, which is fantastic.

The challenges do remain, especially related to performance, qualification and orchestration, and we certainly have our work cut out for us. But OPNFV Danube priorities clearly identified fields to be consolidated: for instance, a complete robustness/stress test strategy still needs to be built.

Learning, sharing and shaping the future: this Plugfest, like the others, was a great success!

More details on the specific outcomes of the OPNFV Danube Plugfest can be found on the official Plugfest white paper, available here.

The next OPNFV Plugfest will take place at the Intel campus near Portland, OR, December 4-8, 2017, and will focus on the upcoming OPNFV Euphrates release. Stay tuned for more details!

Many thanks to Nokia, Huawei and Advantech for having provided on-site equipment. Special thanks to Orange’s organization team, coordinated by Claire Chabrier Larroche and Xiaolong Kong, for their devoted work since the beginning of the year, without which this event could not have happened.

HPE’s Dr. Prodip Sen, CTO of NFV at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and OPNFV Board of Directors Chair, will deliver a keynote address during the upcoming OPNFV Summit focused on “Cloudification of the Telco Network – Are we There Yet?” Read  below for a preview of what you can expect from Dr. Sen’s keynote at OPNFV Summit this year. OPNFV Summit is taking place June 12-15 in Beijing. More details, including onsite agenda and how to register, are available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit

Tell us about your involvement in OPNFV (and open source networking in general) and how it’s evolved over time. 

I am currently the Chair of the OPNFV Board of Directors, and have been the chair since the inception of OPNFV three years ago. (Time for a change I guess!) My involvement with OPNFV and open source in general started as an outgrowth of the NFV movement which some industry veterans (including myself)  helped create. We were looking for an alternative to the typical standards track to encourage faster development and deployment of the technologies required for NFV, and the telco network transformation in general. This led to my awareness of open source and the creation of the OPNFV organization. Since then, I have been engaged with activities in other open source organizations such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight.

Where do you see your role — and that of OPNFV – in terms of the broader end-to-end open networking stack?  
My interest is, and has always been, in seeing how all these open networking activities fit together and how we can make them more synergistic. I see OPNFV as a crucial organization in being the integration project that provides a space for putting the entire stack together. And eventually, showcasing use cases important to the users of this stack.

What new technology or trend in the networking space are you most curious about and why?
Not so much a trend/technology in networking per se, but I am very interested in how the industry takes the last steps of the journey to cloudify the network. We need to incorporate many of the lessons learned  from cloud-as-a-service architectures, microservices etc. and consolidate into a more constrained, quality-of-experience centered world. Will either survive the clash?

In what ways has the industry progressed towards broader adoption of NFV? What are the hurdles?
There has been a lot of progress in telco adoption over the few years since the movement was launched – from skepticism, to grudging acceptance, to “show me,” to now routine inclusion in RFIs, RFPs and trials. We all know that the telco adoption cycle is very long – so it is especially encouraging to see such a new approach gain traction in so short a time. On the other hand, the optimists among us hoped for faster adoption and true large-scale deployment by this time. The hurdles we’re facing are not new or unexpected; many in the industry hoped for (perhaps expected) a faster transformation in attitudes and organizational change, though both are still somewhat lagging.  

Can you give us a preview of what you’ll be talking about onstage at OPNFV Summit in Beijing?
I will be talking about the Cloudification and Disaggregation stages of the telco journey to the cloud, and what we in the industry, and open source and OPNFV in particular, need to pay attention to.

ZTE’s Zhang Fan, Chief Architect of Packet Core, will deliver a keynote address at the upcoming OPNFV Summit focused on “NFV Practice for vEPC Commercial Network.” Read  below for a preview of what you can expect from ZTE onsite at OPNFV Summit this year. OPNFV Summit is taking place June 12-15 in Beijing. More details, including onsite agenda and how to register, are available here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit 

Tell us about your involvement in OPNFV — and open source networking in general. How has this evolved over time?
ZTE’s open source road began in 2014. Now, more than 200 professional developers from ZTE are working with partners in 13 open source communities. Recent Stackalytics.com data shows ZTE is among the top contributors within the OPNFV, OpenStack, and kubernetes communities. ZTE looks forward to continued work with SDN/NFV ecosystem partners to promote maturity of open source and industrial software development.

More specifically, ZTE has released enhanced network solutions, including an SDN controller, SDN switches, intelligent NICs and data plane acceleration. ZTE ZENIC SDN Controller, ZTE DVS (OVS based) and mobile core network are using these technologies via open source.

ZTE’s involvement in open source is currently employed within several commercial products and projects like ZX-TECS based on Openstack and ZX-vManager based on OPEN-O.

Where do you see your role — and that of OPNFV — in terms of the broader end-to-end open networking stack?  
OPNFV plays a key role in the integration of IT technologies and standards organizations by centralizing the ecosystem via a dedicated reference platform, which speeds up NFV development and maturity. Since OPNFV representatives are comprised of CT vendors, operators, and IT vendors, among others; OPNFV reflects common requirements needed across the NFV ecosystem. For example, OPNFV’s strong collaboration with other upstream communities including OpenStack, OpenDaylight, DPDK, FD.io, etc. illustrate the project’s ability to serve as a connection across the end-to-end open networking stack.  

OPNFV is the only open source community targeting  NFV solutions, including infrastructure, VIM and MANO. ZTE is pleased to be joining the OPNFV community along the journey to accelerate open source NFV.

What new technology or trend in the networking space are you most curious about and why?
As NFV/SDN technologies have been deployed by operators and will continue to enable 5G and IoT applications, network infrastructure must be optimized to adjust to a centralized management for controlling the plane, high throughput traffic and ultra-low latency for the data plane. Cloud deployment needs to be extended from the core to the edge. The focus of networking is shifting from functions to efficiency and performance.

On the one hand, SDN is playing a critical role in coordinating all open source components to optimize the network architecture and improve network efficiency. SDN makes it possible to manage the entire network through intelligent orchestration and management systems in a 5G network. So it is quite interesting to investigate how best to provide continuous delivery (CD) of services based on dynamic network functions and automated deployment mechanisms in future networks.

On the other hand, the performance must be improved to meet the requirements of 5G and AR/VR, etc. Currently, we already focus on the software level to identify mechanisms to enhance the processing as fast as possible. By introducing upstream projects like FD.io, we can achieve more data plane acceleration. On top of that, hardware acceleration is also an up-and-coming technical trend. We need to take into consideration that some complex computing or algorithm processing can be offloaded to intelligent cards, which will release a lot of hardware core resources of the data plane being used.

In what ways has the industry progressed towards broader adoption of NFV? What are the hurdles?
For starters, the proposed NFV architecture or solution must provide a cost-effective way to help operators build their networks. There are many open source communities; we need to integrate them together to make networking simpler and more agile. Currently, a lot of operators have started transforming their network, so it is the right time to introduce NFV to replace traditional network components.

Secondly, the industry should adopt more and more vendors and apps to build an open ecosystem instead of the traditional “chimney style.” We should consider how to provide a common platform to make all components integrate more closely. For example, ZTE ElasticNet integrates SDN and NFV technology in order to break the isolation between components. This gives customers a better experience in terms of management, service and new business models.

Additionally, the industry needs to target upcoming new networks and new services. The architecture must be adapted to future (5~10 years’) requirements. With 5G and IoT booming, cloud native- based technology is a good way to broaden NFV.

One of the major hurdles towards broader adoption of NFV is closed architecture and deployment methods. Some industry projects are not authentic NFV networks, but just simple virtualization within one vendor. We need to break vendor lock by leveraging open cloud networks, where customers can select  products based on different layers and needs;  otherwise, big barriers continue to block large-scale NFV application growth.

Can you give us a preview of what you’ll be talking about onstage at OPNFV Summit in Beijing?
We’re looking forward to participating in this year’s OPNFV Summit! In addition to introducing commercial NFV mobile network practices beneficial to open source community development during the main keynotes, ZTE will be onsite for the Design Summit beginning Monday, June 12. We are excited to collaborate with the community, particularly regarding plans for the next OPNFV release, Euphrates.

First posted on Linux.com

The countdown to this year’s OPNFV Summit is on! We’re headed to Beijing June 12-15 for four days of connecting global communities via tutorials, sessions, demos and keynotes targeted toward a diverse set of industry attendees. The largest gathering of OPNFV developers and community members from across the globe, OPNFV Summit is an ​annual ​conference ​to ​collaborate, ​innovate ​and ​explore ​the ​latest ​developments in open source Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). OPNFV is The Linux Foundation’s open source project for integrated testing of the full, next-generation networking stack. Will you join us?

With just a few weeks to go, we are pleased to announce our preliminary lineup of expert keynote speakers ready to share their insights and perspectives along the NFV journey.

The keynote presentations will cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Accelerating the maturity and adoption of NFV
• Turning networks to meet the needs of global communities
• Deployment experience of vEPC in commercial networks
• Cloudification of the telco network

Here are a few of the industry leaders participating as keynote speakers/panelists:

• Heather Kirksey, Director, OPNFV
• Zhang Fan, Chief Architect of Packet Core, ZTE
• John Healy, VP, Data Center Group, GM, Datacenter Network Solutions Group, Intel
• Susan James, Head of Product Line NFV Infrastructure, Ericsson
• Forrest Lee, OPNFV Open Source Development Team Director, Huawei
• Prodip Sen, CTO of NFV, HPE
• Lingli Deng, Principal Engineer, China Mobile Research Institute
• Chongfeng Xie, Director, IP and Future Network Research Center, CTBR
• Eric Debeau, Head of R&D Team, Orange
• Wei Leping, China SDN/NFV Alliance

Along with our featured keynote presentations, this year’s event will feature a diverse set of more than 65 presentations and demos spanning session tracks that include: Community and Upstream; Futures and Research; NFV Applications and Orchestration; NFV Platform Requirements; NFV Strategy and End User Stories; and Testing, Infrastructure and DevOps. You can view the full Summit agenda, including keynotes, breakout sessions, and demos, here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit/program/schedule

OPNFV Summit also includes a handful of co-located events, including those hosted by some of our upstream communities. Included in this year’s line-up are: OPNFV Orientation, Sunday, June 11; The OPNFV Developer Design Forum, Monday & Tuesday, June 12-13; ONAP Mini-Summit, Monday, June 12;  OpenDaylight Mini-Summit, June 12; CNCF Day at OPNFV, Tuesday, June 13; FD.io and DPDK Mini-Summit, Tuesday, June 13;  OpenStack Upstream Institute, Wednesday & Thursday, June 14-15;  and the Open-NFP Developer Conference, Monday, June 12; and more.

OPNFV Summit 2017 will be here in just a few weeks! Make your plans to join us now.

To register for the OPNFV Summit — including information on traveling, accomodations, and visas — please visit http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit/attend/registration. Members of the media who would like to reserve a complimentary press pass to OPNFV Summit should contactpr@opnfv.org.

Content first posted on Linux.com

Click HERE to register for this free webinar on Wednesday, May 24 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. 

The Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) project within the Linux Foundation is not your typical open source networking project! It’s essentially a systems integration and testing project that pulls together relevant components from other open source projects “downstream” into a reference NFV Platform. Importantly, it also facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components by submitting user requirements “upstream.” In this way, it can be though of as “mid-stream” project that serves to accelerate the development of NFV products and services.

OPNFV performs system integration as an open community effort. The technical community mantra is “Create. Compose. Test. Deploy. Iterate.” which means OPNFV creates and evolves components in lock-step with upstream communities, composes and integrates those components, deploys and tests the integrated system, and finally publishes the test results – all in an iterative and fully automated way. This is an example of DevOps for networking in the open. OPNFV also works closely with end users to ensure the outputs are meeting their requirements and facilitate the software-defined transformation of their networks.

Coming off the project’s fourth major release, Danube, Heather Kirksey and Frank Brockners will show how OPNFV has evolved to further support the open source networking ecosystem—including OPNFV’s sophisticated Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) infrastructure, testing capabilities, and DevOps methodologies. They’ll also explain how to get involved and contribute to this dynamic and growing project.

Click HERE to register for this free webinar on Wednesday, May 24 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. 

The OPNFV community is comprised of a diverse set of active developers who are passionate about transforming the industry through open source NFV. This blog series highlights the people who are collaborating in the trenches to transform global networks through open source NFV.

About Sofia Wallin

Sofia is currently working as an R&D Project Manager at Ericsson. As part of the Ericsson Cloud Systems and Technology organization, she is involved in driving open source engagements as well as internal strategies. She started at Ericsson in 2011, and before joining OPNFV, she was responsible for establishing the release handling process for the Ericsson Cloud System development organization.

How are you involved with OPNFV (e.g., specific projects or focus areas)?
I am the PTL for one of the projects, Opnfvdocs. The Opnfvdocs project is responsible for the user and community/platform documentation. Our main purpose is to provide the community with guidelines on how to document each release; this includes document structure and templates as well as tooling and branding, which ensures consistency across all OPNFV projects. Working with documentation gives you a broad understanding of the platform since it requires cooperation with pretty much all projects involved. It is a central and fun part of development that often gets a bit overlooked but is very important; it is the link between the product and its users.

What are you most proud of with the OPNFV Danube release?
During the Danube release we achieved a great goal migrating our documentation to the newly established, docs.opnfv.org.

We are using read the docs which is a community supported documentation host. Supporting various tools, read the docs allows the user to set up an environment that suits current standards. We didn’t want the migration to affect how the projects work with their documentation and at the same time not compromise on quality, I’m happy with the outcome and this is a result of efforts from everyone involved in the migration.

As part of the cross-collaboration initiative for documentation, we are currently working together with ODL and FD.io to create a common way of publishing and branding our documentation, and this migration was a great achievement for OPNFV. By making the documentation accessible through its own top domain we are increasing the usability.

What’s also new for Danube is that we use Google Analytics that enable us to track downloads. As a PTL, it is important for me to see what documentation is actually being read. If we are spending time documenting parts that no one is paying attention to we should perhaps rethink and spend more time on the parts that our users are reading and using.

What advice would you give to developers (or others) interested in joining the OPNFV community?
Be curious and don’t be shy. It’s scary to push your first commits for review before knowing how it will be received, but that is the whole point – to collaborate. You will never learn as much as you do when working within an open source project, and OPNFV is definitely not an exception. You will get to know people from all around the world, from different companies with different backgrounds, personalities, and competences. It’s amazing!

What part of the world do you live in? Why there?
I was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden….the capital of Scandinavia. It’s a beautiful city with a lot of things to do and see. Rich architecture and history is everywhere. I’m blessed to live in the city center within walking distance to restaurants, museums, bars or whatever I’m up for.

The OPNFV community, comprised of a diverse ecosystem of developers, vendors, operators, end users and others working to integrate the end-to-end open networking stack, will be hosting an OPNFV Day as part of OpenStack Summit’s Open Source Days on Monday, May 8 from 11:15 am – 5:20 pm. Join us to learn how the OPNFV and OpenStack Communities work together to accelerate NFV.

The workshop is open to all OpenStack attendees (though registration is required), and anyone interested in learning more about open source NFV welcome to participate. Participants can expect to become familiar with the collaboration between OPNFV & OpenStack communities, the feature development process, the march toward common infrastructure, and how to get involved. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of a brand new book: Understanding OPNFV: Accelerate NFV transformation using OPNFV (either at the Day or in the OPNFV booth).

The combination of OpenStack and OPNFV allows developers and users to tap into the most comprehensive set of NFV capabilities available today. A great example of the power of this collaboration can be seen in this short keynote demo from OpenStack Barcelona on fault management, a key telecom use case. Members of the Doctor team will be on hand to show how they delivered fault detection and management into OpenStack.

Other sessions will cover a range of topics including an OPNFV overview, OPNFV developer tools and release release process, how OPNFV uses OpenStack and how it’s useful, OpenStack Gluon/OPNFV NetReady, community test labs and testing process, and cross-community Continuous Integration (XCI). Demos and case studies will also be featured. View the full day’s schedule and add it your Openstack schedule here.

OPNFV will also be present on the showfloor, as part of the the Linux Foundation Projects cluster in the Technology Showcase. Stop by during the Marketplace Mixer on Monday, May 8 from 6:00 – 7:30 for beer, treats, and OPNFV swag. See you there!

The OPNFV community was out in full force during the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, CA earlier this month. With the announcement of our fourth platform release, OPNFV Danube, co-hosting a reception, holding a demo in the S3 booth—as well as several community presentations and tutorials—OPNFV was a critical part of the conversation around open source networking, and how the various open source networking projects and standards are coming together in the full networking stack. See below for highlights from this year’s event.

Community Reception
Kicking things off Monday night, OPNFV co-hosted the Open Source Community Reception along with OpenDaylight, OpenStack, FD.io and ONAP. Guests enjoyed drinks and hors d’oeuvres at Levi’s Stadium in the Yahoo! Fantasy Football Lounge. A big “thank you” to Serro, Juniper and Inocybe for sponsoring the event!

Tutorial: Getting Started with NFV Testing
OPNFV community members Trevor Cooper (Intel) and Jose Lausuch (Ericsson) presented a tutorial on “Getting Started with NFV Testing.” As a key tenet of moving NFV from PoC to deployment, testing is crucial to ensuring a fully supported and integrated service provider network. They shared best practices for open source NFV testing, including: methodology; mapping to ETSI NFV use-case/s; open source project integration; testing dashboards; CI/CD; and testing acceleration. If you missed the session, slides are available here, and you can view the video of the tutorial on the OPNFV YouTube channel.

S3 Solutions Showcase: OPNFV Pharos LasS Demo 
Big thanks to Jack Morgan (Intel), Jose Lausuch (Ericsson) and other community
members for manning the OPNFV demo in the S3 Solutions Showcase on the showfloor. We had a great turnout with lots of interest in our Community Pharos Labs-as-a-Service (LaaS), which showed attendees how to leverage the new OPNFV Pharos dashboard and LaaS to try out an OPNFV deployment on their own.  More information on Pharos is available on the OPNFV website here.

Exhibit Hall: Linux Foundation Projects Pavilion

We co-hosted a space in the Exhibit Hall in conjunction with Linux Foundation sister projects FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, PNDA, OpenSwitch, and others. Many of the projects—including OPNFV—gave informal presentations in the lounge, handed out swag, and made some new contacts. Thank you to Chris Price, Ritch Dusome, and Frank Brockners for presenting on behalf of OPNFV in the LF Projects Pavilion and to all the community members who spent time in the booth talking with folks about open source networking.

Presentation Highlights

• Panel Discussion: CI/CD Lessons Learned in Open Source Networking Moderated by Heather Kirksey, this session featured Gildas Linalis, Kyle Mestery, and Adriano Vieira for a lively discussion on various perspectives of CI/CD lessons learned from the trenches.
• Fireside Chat: DevOps + OPNFV: How Automated CI/CD Enables Network Provisioning OPNFV Ambassador and Principal Developer at Ericsson, Fatih Degirmenci, and Heather Kirksey sat down to discuss how DevOps CI/CD methodologies have become the backbone of OPNFV and enable a new paradigm of network provisioning, agility, speed, and technical diversity.
• OPNFV Update: The Danube Release and What Lies Around the Bend Heather Kirksey and OPNFV TSC Chair Tapio Tallgren (Nokia) gave a detailed update on the project, with a focus on  the Danube release, OPNFV’s approach to cross-community CI (XCI), performance testing, MANO, and what’s next for the project. Slides from the presentation are available here.
• Other great sessions included AT&T’s The Nirvana SDN Stack for NFV by Paul Carver; a panel on the Implications of 5G to All Layers of the Stack moderated by OPNFV Board Chair Prodip Sen (HPE); and a tutorial on the Interoperability Challenge in Telecom and NFV Environments presented by OPNFV community members Ildiko Vancsa, Carsten Rossenhövel, and Chris Price. The session focused on the recent ETSI PlugTest and NIA-commissioned interoperability testing, their results, and how to architect full NFV solutions that will work together; watch the video and check out the slides.  
• The Linux Foundation’s Arpit Joshipura laid out his vision for open source networking projects and standards in Wednesday’s keynote: Harmonizing of Open Source Networking. Get the slides and see the video.

Video: Heather Kirksey meets with TIA NOW
OPNFV’s Heather Kirksey spoke with Abe Nejad of TIA NOW about OPNFV’s integration of upstream open source projects such as OpenDaylight, OpenStack, and KVM and others into an open, carrier-grade NFV reference platform.

Check out our Community News page for OPNFV press coverage from the Danube release and our presence on site at the event, and if you aren’t already, please follow us on Twitter (@OPNFV), Facebook, and LinkedIn for real-time project updates.

If you weren’t able to catch us at ONS, we hope to see you at another upcoming event, like the Danube Plugfest, OpenStack Summit, the Big Communications Event, or our Summit in Beijing. And be sure to save the date for ONS 2018! The event will be held March 27–29, 2018 in Los Angeles, CA at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown.

Good-bye Santa Clara, hello LA!

By Tapio Tallgren

The OPNFV community has achieved another milestone: its fourth release, Danube. I’d like to extend a big “thank you” to everyone who contributed to the release! Although the community is continuously iterating on OPNFV projects throughout the year, the release itself marks a special occasion: it is the moment when our create-compose-deploy-test-iterate playbook comes to fruition and we take a moment to share our progress with the world.  

For me, the Danube release represents a state of maturity for OPNFV. A clear indication of this is the new test results dashboard: testresults.opnfv.org/reporting. Here, anyone can check the testing status of any OPNFV scenario across multiple OPNFV releases with just a few clicks. This provides an easy and accessible view of potential error logs, in real time, so any issues can be quickly addressed. Another mark of the project’s maturity is the growing number of OPNFV feature projects that make valuable contributions upstream. For example, the Doctor project  implements host management to OpenStack, while the Service Function Chaining (SFC) project works in tandem with OpenDaylight’s SFC project, OpenStack’s Tacker, and OpenvSwitch. The purpose of OPNFV was not to create a separate platform for NFV, but to integrate NFV functionalities across the stack while identifying gaps—a role that, with Danube, is clearly taking shape.

From the beginning, the OPNFV project has featured multiple installers, which makes sense given the varied backgrounds of the community—we could not pick just one Linux distribution, and we did not want to pick a single SDN controller. However, the goal is to automate both the testing process and the process by which we work with upstream communities as much as possible, thereby ensuring faster and more agile development. One example of how we’re marching towards increased automation is the creation of a pod descriptors template. This means that a lab owner can write a single document for each pod that describes its configurations: what IP addresses should be used, what interfaces are reserved for what purposes, etc. So any OPNFV deployment will one day be able to use this description and install the OPNFV platform on the pod. This means that different installers can be deployed in a matter of hours, enabling a “Lab-as-a-Service”.

We’re also working to streamline how we work upstream. If there is a change in OpenStack or OpenDaylight or FD.io (for example) that might pass its respective upstream tests but cause a failure in an OPNFV deployment, we want to flag that as early as possible. Bugs are easier to catch when they are new.

While installation and testing are key tenets of the Danube release, there are other enhancements worth mentioning. One new experimental functionality is Gluon, which is about redesigning OpenStack networking. The scope of OPNFV is also expanding into the Management and Orchestration (MANO) space, with Open-O (now ONAP) and OpenStack Tacker part of some MANO-related OPNFV scenarios.

You can find more technical details about what’s included in OPNFV Danube on the OPNFV software page, in the press release, and on the wiki.

We’re already hard at work on the next OPNFV release: Euphrates, as we gear up for our annual OPNFV Summit, which will be held (fittingly) on the same continent as the Euphrates, in Beijing June 12-15.

In the interim, you can join the community for the Danube Plugfest, April 24-28, hosted by Orange at their Paris facilities. Here, the community can come together to test the release with different installers and hardware combinations. We’ll also have a strong presence at the OpenStack Summit in Boston in May. Be sure to visit the Events page on our website to stay up-to-date on OPNFV activities across the globe.

By Guest Blogger Randy Levensalor, Lead Architect, Business Technologies, CableLabs

This post first published on the CableLabs blog.

In a previous blog, I have provided an overview of the SNAPS platform which is CableLabs’ SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack project. The key objectives for SNAPS are to make it much easier for NFV vendors to on-board their applications, provide transparent APIs for various kinds of infrastructure and reduce the complexity of integration testing.

I am thrilled to share our latest SNAPS success.  We have written an OpenStack API abstraction library that also contains many automated tests and we have contributed it to the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project at the Linux Foundation.  OPNFV is a project where service providers and network vendors collaborate to improve the capabilities and adoption of open source Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Our results have also been shared at NFV World Congress, SDN World Congress, OPNFV Summit [video], Open Networking Summit (ONS) [video] [pdf] and the Big Communications Event (BCE).

The Rationale for our Approach

CableLabs has deep expertise developing specifications by following a collaborative, iterative approach.  In many ways, the open source software development process mirrors many of these specification development processes.  In the open source communities, CableLabs provides source code and feedback coming from our integration and debugging activity.  In fact, CableLabs contributions are included in key open source projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight.  In this way, we are making it easier for vendors to use open source projects to build solutions for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

We have generated practical knowledge and insights through our hands-on experience of building and operating an active SDN/NFV application development lab.  And we took vendor neutrality to the next level by basing our software stack on purely open source solutions and based on the OPNFV reference configuration.  We did not use versions of OpenStack, OpenDaylight, etc. that have been tested and customized by a vendor.  This allowed us to interact with a much larger community for new features and fixes.

The CableLabs team, supported by vendors and services providers, has moved our project into OPNFV as “SNAPS-OO”, based on the idea that it is an Object Oriented way to work with our SDN/NFV Application development Platform and Stack.  The project was quickly accepted and is now being used by the release testing team to verify each OPNFV build.  With the integration of SNAPS-OO into the OPNFV FuncTest project, our contributions are now part of the release criteria and suite of tests that will be used at the upcoming OPNFV PlugFest next month.

Some of the benefits that SNAPS-OO delivers are:

• Ease of use for new developers
• A rich library of example applications and test suites
• Support for accessing multiple secured clouds
• Automated cleanup of the NFVI when updates are applied
• Quick identification of component failure(s)

As a result of this open source approach, and in just a few weeks since SNAPS-OO was released, we have seen a significant increase in the level of contributions and adoption.

Next Steps

• Continue to expand the capabilities supported by SNAPS-OO.
• Encourage additional OPNFV projects to use SNAPS-OO.
• Use SNAPS-OO and other tools to run much more sophisticated SDN/NFV workloads.
• Share SNAPS-OO with more open source communities.

How SNAPS-OO Benefits Our Membership

SNAPS-OO is helping to improve the quality of the open source projects associated with the NFV infrastructure and Virtualization Infrastructure Managers that many members are using today and plan to use in the future.  SNAPS-OO can be used to validate that the infrastructure is installed properly and it will be playing a key role in the Kyrio NFV Interoperability lab.  Future NFV development provided by vendors will benefit from the use of SNAPS-OO.  With the variety of workloads that we will be running on our SNAPS platform, we will be able to specify a single configuration that can run future NFV workloads alongside other cloud hosted applications.