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By Lincoln Lavoie, senior engineer, Broadband Technologies, University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL)

This post first published on the UNH-IOL blog

We are looking forward to hosting the OPNFV Plugfest the week of December 5 – 9, 2016 at the UNH Interoperability Lab. The week-long event is a great opportunity for organizations to test the interoperability of specific OPNFV implementations over multiple hardware platforms as well as Virtual Network Functions (VNF)applications.

Plugfests provide a venue for to do real-time, hands-on testing with others in the industry. These events can be extremely valuable during the early stages of technology.  At just over two years old, OPNFV is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation that facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. This will be the project’s second Plugfest, focused on its recent Colorado platform release. Details from the inaugural Plugfest held in May 2016 may be found in this report.

The upcoming OPNFV Plugfest will continue to focus on both hardware and software integration as well as deployment of commercial VNFs and controllers across various upstream open source ecosystems. The event will also include testing of OPNFV hardware based on the Open Compute Project (OCP), which will create a fully open implementation from hardware through software.

Though still evolving, options for OPNFV Interoperability Plugfest Test Cases include:

• OPNFV Turn-up Scope
  • Basic Installer Test
  • Scale I/O Test Case

• SDN Integration Scope
• VNF Applications Scope
  • VNF Package On-boarding Test Case
  • VNF Graceful Termination Test Case
  • VNF Forceful Termination Test Case
• VNF Portability Scope
  • Hello World
  • More Advanced VNFs
• Dovetail Testing Scope

OPNFV members and non-members, alike, are invited to attend. Participation of developers from many diverse organizations is encouraged to ensure a well-rounded set of perspectives.

Additionally, and for the first time, a Hackfest has been organized for the same week as the Plugfest, and is expected to draw many more OPNFV developers. These events will provide a truly unique opportunity for participants and developers to advance the OPNFV platform. If there are things you’d like to see in the upcoming OPNFV releases, we encourage you to show up, participate, and get things done!

• View the Plugfest collaboration wiki page
• View the Hackfest planning page
• View the Plugfest website
• Register for the plugfest

About the author of this post

Lincoln Lavoie

Lincoln Lavoie, Senior Engineer, Broadband Technologies, University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), www.iol.unh.edu. Lincoln Lavoie is the senior engineer in Broadband Technologies and acts as an industry lead for the executive steering body at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). In this role, he is responsible for the technical management of the broadband access technology grounds, including Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON), and Technical Report 069 (TR-069).

By Tapio Tallgren, new OPNFV Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Chair

I would like to introduce myself to those in OPNFV community who don’t yet know me and share some thoughts about the project. I am very excited to have been elected the TSC chair and I will certainly do my best to support the community. I see the role of the OPNFV TSC chair like that of the lead rider for a team in a bicycle race: that person not the best rider on the team; but he or she is the one who works the hardest so that the real stars on the team can shine in what they do best, be it sprinting or climbing mountains or time trials.

I have a long history at Nokia, but of course the company has changed a lot during those years, and so have my duties. I was working on Nokia internal cloud infrastructure at the time the initial OPNFV formation meeting took place and began splitting my time with Nokia cloud architecture and OPNFV. The time I spent with real products on the real cloud was great as it gave me the opportunity to benchmark promising new technologies—like DPDK at the time—and understand where the real performance bottlenecks lie. We still have a few internal OPNFV pods in our lab and I plan to keep spending some time tuning and benchmarking those.

Looking back at the initial OPNFV platform releases and comparing OPNFV with other open source projects, I believe we have made significant progress. Installation of OpenStack used to be a near-endless loop of run the installer→ run into trouble → debug → search the Internet → and repeat. Now, most things just work, which is the way it should be. While I like to be able to debug our OPNFV systems, it’s good to have new challenges. As I see it, much of OPNFV’s value for the industry is eliminating the NFV grunt work that adds no value. For example, much of the early performance benchmarking work I did myself can now be done by installing the OPNFV Yardstick project.

As TSC chair, I’m hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the various aspects of OPNFV. One way to do this—which will benefit the project and community as a whole—is to make OPNFV more accessible technically for those outside the project. I plan to use this role, and these blog posts, to present some of the great technical work that is being done across OPNFV, make OPNFV easier to understand for newcomers, recruit more industry involvement, and do what it takes make OPNFV work.

I invite you to join me on the journey to accelerate open source NFV and get involved with OPNFV!

About the author of this post

Tapio Tallgren

Tapio Tallgren works at Nokia’s Mobile Networks Architecture & Technology unit. He is serves as the OPNFV Technical Steering Committee Chair as well as the group’s Nokia representative. Besides open source, he has worked as an architect in Nokia’s cloud platforms and on performance measurements and optimizations for Nokia NFVs.

This month marks our two-year anniversary as a project.

In the grand scheme of things, two years is not very long, but I am constantly amazed at how far the community has come in such a short time. For example, we’re now 53+ members strong (with many actual end users); we’re comprised of 47 approved projects; we’re running 15 operational OPNFV test-bed infrastructure labs (via the Pharos Project); we have three platform releases under our belt; and our developer force is over 260 and growing. This is no small feat, especially for a project with the formidable challenge of working upstream to assemble and test an open source NFV platform to help transform the industry.

However, our progress has not come without challenges. In fact, when OPNFV first formed, we really weren’t sure if what we’re trying to do—orchestrate an entire industry to collaboratively create an open source NFV platform—would actually work. It’s an extremely daunting task, and, like any two-year-old, we are still trying to figure out the world around us and how to interact with it. While we’re feeling a bit more confident in our processes (e.g.,our recent Colorado release was delivered on the original release date) and are beginning to deliver real value into the open source ecosystem, there is certainly still work to be done (and, on occasion, we may suffer from a skinned knee). Things like refining our release processes, enhancing CI/CD, and delivering faster and better feedback to our upstream communities are crucial—along with longer-term goals like MANO integration and how we interact with technologies like Containers and IoT.

But today is about reflection on and celebration of what we’ve accomplished on this incredible journey. We’ve asked several of the original OPNFV founders to share their perspectives on how our community has evolved over the past two years and here’s what they had to say.

Chris Donley, Huawei
“Two years ago, I joined OPNFV because I believed in its potential as an open source project to develop and disseminate NFV solutions. In essence, “many hands make light work,” and everyone in the industry could play a part in creating a shared framework for the next evolution in networking. Two years later, we have successfully developed three releases and made a tangible impact on upstream projects. We have also made significant progress building our testing infrastructure through the Pharos project and our Plugfest events. Going forward, I believe that testing will become an increasingly important way to demonstrate OPNFV’s value proposition as it will help demonstrate interoperability across solutions and build confidence that OPNFV solutions are being faithfully adopted. I look forward to the next two years.”

Tetsuya Nakamura, CableLabs
“To be honest, I couldn’t imagine how far the community would progress when we initiated OPNFV two years ago. I hoped that OPNFV would become a place where the telecom industry and IT open source communities could meet together to understand how NFV/SDN works in practice, and influence the relevant upstream projects and the ETSI NFV-ISG. Now, I can talk with many open source engineers whom I had never seen before. Also, several commercial issues such as VNF lifecycle management and license management have been raised and started to be discussed. We are still only halfway through NFV realization, and given the fact that interoperability is critically important for NFV, OPNFV should remain at the center of this open source integration endeavor.”

Sandra Rivera, Intel
“Two years ago, OPNFV was a promise of open collaboration and an open source project to accelerate NFV realization. Today, OPNFV is living up to its promise and has become the defacto NFV framework standard for network operators. In the past year, the community has made significant progress towards enabling NFV functionality, promoting use cases, and implementing interoperability testing. A few highlights include:

• The first major interoperability testing conducted at our May Plugfest , where the community demonstrated multi-vendor interoperability for NFV applications running on standard server platforms.
• Extending our work into MANO, a major milestone towards building a complete stack that can be deployed in an operator environment.
• Addressed barriers to adoption by reducing latency with real-time virtualization capabilities, making performance much more deterministic.

As we continue to build on the promise and progress, I’m looking forward to developing additional functionality like Service Assurance and enhanced telemetry for real-time monitoring and analytics. Network operators have indicated that these capabilities are critical to running real-world deployments, and we’ll continue to work with the community to include these in future releases. We are inspired by what we’ve accomplished together, and are proud to continue the journey with you.”

Prodip Sen, HPE
“A little over two years ago we came together to build an open source organization with a purpose—to launch an industry implementation effort that would accelerate the development and adoption of NFV. Many of us were woefully ignorant of what open source entails, and we did not come to the table with existing code bases that were to be integrated. Rather, we had an architectural framework and some ideas. From that point, in two short years (believe me they do feel short), we have just completed our third software release, Colorado, which has been validated for 37 deployable scenarios. Just look at the statistics in the the chart to the right and you’ll get the idea—we are a healthy, productive, vibrant community.”

“As we move into the third year, we are expanding beyond our initial (self-imposed) constraints. OPNFV now has working groups focused in the areas of Infrastructure, MANO, Testing, and Security. Our cooperation with existing and newly formed upstream open source projects—e.g., OpenStack, ODL, Open-O—is increasing, and we are starting up projects that address operational and performance issues. We have a newly formed End User advisory Group whose members include participants from the cable and financial industries. As we have demonstrated quite effectively already, we intend to be an enabler in the networking transformation journey—and a partner who can be relied upon. There are more busy years ahead!”

In closing,  I also want to thank our vibrant community, which is by far our greatest asset. As I told Linux.com in August, the telecom industry is used to working in standards bodies where competitors join forces toward a common aim, but the level of collaboration required to develop implementations in an open source project is even higher. People who want to see different solutions are supporting the broader community and helping all to move forward, realizing that we all benefit from the work. I’ve been completely delighted in the spirit of community that this group has fostered in its time so far. For an industry that is very new to the world of open source, we have definitely hit the ground running.

Learn more about getting involved with OPNFV.

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About the author of this post
Heather Kirksey

Heather Kirksey
Director, OPNFV

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.

This article was first published on Linux.com

Security is always a hot-button issue, and one the folks at the OPNFV project take seriously. In fact, the project — an integrated open platform for facilitating NFV deployments — is among a handful of open source organizations to recently earn a CII Best Practices Badge for security compliance.

(The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), run by The Linux Foundation, is a multi-million dollar project to fund and support critical elements of the global information infrastructure, and, among other resources, the project offers a Best Practices Badge program.  While serving as an open source secure development model, projects earning the badge demonstrate a commitment to security and must meet strict requirements and criteria.)

OPNFV works upstream to leverage a variety of existing code bases from leading open source projects across compute, storage, and networking to fill gaps where needed to meet carrier-grade end user requirements. The project also is still relatively young (approaching its second birthday), all of which makes earning the best practices badge no small feat. But with security an increasing concern among the telco industry, especially as NFV begins to scale and quickly transform network infrastructures, it was an important step for the project that signals the project’s commitment to secure-aware development.

To find out more about the process and what it took for OPNFV to earn the badge, we sat down with members of the OPNFV Security Working Group, including Sona Sarmadi (Security Responsible at Enea Software AB), Luke Hinds (Principal Software Engineer at RedHat) and Ashlee Young (Distinguished Strategist/Engineer, Standards & Open Source at Huawei).

Why did OPNFV pursue CII certification?

There is no doubt that security is one of the most important features in all software today, including open source and NFV in particular. In fact, security was recently cited as one area the telco industry would like to see OPNFV focus on more moving forward.

During the course of creating the NFV standards, a key discussion point was how we would ensure the code we leveraged from so many open source projects would be secure. CII provided a scope and a framework from which we could approach this topic within OPNFV. Earning the best practices badge is also a very tangible way for us to assure the industry of our commitment to security and quality. It also provides a necessary guideline for project leads to follow to achieve due diligence and ensure their portion of the overall solution is secure. By sharing the responsibility throughout our community, we can all help do our part.

What did you need to do to meet the requirements and what was the hardest part?

The requirements to get the badge are quite extensive, so we had some work to do in order to become compliant. For example, we removed support for crypto algorithms that are no longer considered secure (e.g., MD5) and also updated the OPNFV wiki pages with more specific and clear instructions on how to report security incidents. But probably the hardest part of the process was corralling input from all of the developers in a timely fashion.

It’s also worth noting that while earning the badge was an exciting challenge in itself, the real challenge will be in following these practices to ensure that a high level of security is maintained, which depends on involvement from everybody in the project, from developers to management. In any environment, security can never be achieved by an isolated security group.

What impact will this have on OPNFV security in general?

Earning the CII badge will have a HUGE impact on OPNFV’s general approach to building security into the development model (something all open source projects should model). Statistics show that around 50 percent of vulnerabilities in a software are “flaws” (usually design fault/defective design, which is hard to fix after software has been released) and 50 percent bugs (implementation fault). Following these best practices will hopefully address both design and implementation faults before they become vulnerabilities.

What will the community do moving forward to stay compliant?

To ensure we maintain compliance, the OPNFV Security Working Group is developing a tool to automate checks — such as code lint scanning — and checking for insecure crypto use. This tool has been made available to our community and to our Project Technical Leads (PTLs), but we are also investigating the best way to incorporate it into our overall continuous integration process.

What are you most proud of regarding certification?

I’d have to say our collaboration and teamwork. We are a small team with limited time and resources located in different parts of the world, so earning the CII certification was no small feat! Our experience was also a great example of the power of collaborative open source communities in action; whenever I got stuck, there was always someone willing to lend quick feedback.

By Luke Hinds, principal software engineer, NFV Partner Engineering in the Office of Technology at Red Hat 

NFV Security has recently become a hot topic and was a key theme discussed at the recent OPNFV Summit in Berlin. A survey, which was conducted for OPNFV by Heavy Reading and released at the Summit, stated security is the top technology OPNFV “should investigate.” Summit keynote speaker, Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure, delivered a presentation on the importance of security. He highlighted the grave consequences that can result from a lack of consideration and planning on securing key infrastructure (which alongside Energy, also includes Telecoms). I also gave an OPNFV Security Working Group presentation.

As security continues to be a key area to investigate, now would be an apt time to highlight the work of the OPNFV Security Group and invite interested parties to join us.

The OPNFV Security Working group, was formed to improve OPNFV security through development, architecture, documentation, secure code review, vulnerability management, and upstream collaboration with other security groups. The group also provides an ‘umbrella’ organization to encourage development of security-centric functions within the OPNFV ecosystem.

Within the OPNFV, the three project work areas include:

Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge Program

The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge Program is a program under the Linux Foundation for open source communities to self-audit their current security posture. This involves many steps, such as insuring a secure release process, secure tooling, and vulnerability handling.

CI / CD Security Scanning

Security Scanning is a project to insure security compliance and perform vulnerability checks as part of an automated CI / CD NFV platform delivery process. The project makes use of the existing NIST SCAP format and OpenSCAP tools to perform deep scanning of NFVi nodes to insure they are hardened and free of known CVE reported vulnerabilities.

Currently the project will perform security checks of the Linux Host OS and OpenStack deployment on the NFVi nodes with the profile of ‘compute’ and ‘control.’ Each check will verify a system meets defined security standards, such as DISA STIG or FedRamp. Plans are underway to extend the checks to SDN controllers and include GPG signing of reports.

Inspector

Inspector is a project to ensure the existing audit framework for the critical components in OPNFV are extensive enough and compliant to industry standards and foreseeable business use cases.

We welcome questions about the security group and also encourage interested parties to get involved. In fact, out OPNFV Security Group motto is: “It’s not what Security can do for you, but what you can do for Security.” We welcome contributions from across the ecosystem (from vendors, to network operators, and more), to join us and help make NFV a secure, robust environment. A great first step is to join our weekly Wednesday meeting, 14:00 UTC, over IRC on freenode, channel #opnfv-sec.

For more details of the OPNFV Security Group, please visit the group’s wiki page.

About the author of this post
Luke Hinds

Luke Hinds is a principal software engineer, working in NFV Partner Engineering in the Office of Technology at Red Hat. He has a fifteen year career as a security architect & engineer mainly focused on topics such as Telco Cloud, LTE Radio Transport, SS7 and Mobile Broadband security. He started his career in electronics as a server repair technician for Texas Instruments. He lives in a small town in Wiltshire, UK with his wife and two daughters.

We are lucky to have a board of directors who are engaged and committed to helping OPNFV be successful. Our board is comprised of industry leaders whose purpose is to ensure the nascent OPNFV community has the infrastructure and resources it needs to grow and sustain itself. They provide guidance and support on our marketing, financial and governance activities and each of them is committed to our shared mission of advancing a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services.

As interest in OPNFV continues to grow, our membership has as well. Our Silver membership in particular has grown from 24 vendor members at launch to 41 today. Board representation for our Silver members has also grown from one to four, including the two newest Silver directors, Bob Monkman of ARM and John Zannos of Canonical, who were elected by their constituents to provide input on behalf of their Silver colleagues.

“I see OPNFV and the community of developers and other contributors that drive it, to be vitally important the realizing the vision of NFV,” said Bob Monkman, ARM. “The learnings we get from integrating, identifying gaps, considering options etc., in a collaborative team spanning stakeholders across the value chain, will surely accelerate the rate of innovation way beyond what was possible in the old way. The Silver Board Director option is a great way for the Silver membership to be represented in guiding the initiative and I am grateful to have been elected to serve in this role.”

“NFV will change how carriers deliver network services by accelerating innovation and time to revenue,” said John Zannos, vice president, Canonical. “OPNFV has a critical role in accelerating the adoption of NFV by demonstrating it through an open source collaboration of telecom carriers, universities, hardware and software companies. I am appreciative of the opportunity to represent the Silver membership on the OPNFV Board. The OPNFV framework will demonstrate how NFV will help the telecom carriers adopt and thrive in a software based economy.”

To have such great leadership from around the industry is a testament to the commitment for open source NFV as the community works toward delivering its first code base. Welcome aboard!

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.

OPNFV’s first Plugfest was held at CableLabs’ facility in Louisville, CO. This event, which focused on deployment and integration of OPNFV as well as Virtual Network Function (VNF) applications, was open to both OPNFV members and non-members.

A key goal of the Plugfest was to fortify OPNFV’s already unique testing projects and infrastructure (functional and performance) across new use cases from OPNFV members and other interested parties.  Forty one participants from nineteen organizations–including three non-members–from around the world attended. They brought their key NFV use cases and the technologies needed to bring them to fruition. Many commented that the in-person collaboration was a major benefit.

OPNFV began eighteen months ago as an effort to ensure that open source projects such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight and others can be integrated into a carrier-grade environment that fully supports the performance and availability requirements of service provider networks.

Accordingly, OPNFV, along with CableLabs and Kyrio, hosted the plugfest to help establish testing criteria and find testing solutions to ensure NFV interoperability.

Mitchell Ashley, President and General Manager of Kyrio said, “Kyrio was founded by CableLabs to bring innovations and expertise to the market.  Our experienced engineers are thought leaders in NFV. We congratulate OPNFV on its inaugural plugfest! It supports our mission to guide the community in virtualizing network services.”

The Plugfest used the test functionality first methodology and then measured results accordingly. The Functest (function testing) and Yardstick (system measurement) projects were heavily represented, along with the the Storperf (storage performance) and CPerf (controller performance) projects. In particular, the Cperf project is doing extensive SDN controller integration on various installers.

Additionally, all of the installer groups (Apex, JOID, Fuel and Compass) were represented and members extensively used these installers on different platforms (including on-site community labs that were generously provided by Huawei and Intel).

The Plugfest focused on the installation of NFVI and of VNFs (such as vIMS and vEPC) on multiple hardware platforms using multiple installers. In many instances, these combinations were attempted for the first time, and with OPNFV’s testing infrastructure in place, new VNF were benchmarked much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

In addition to all the real-time interop testing of NFV infrastructure and applications, the Plugfest included several well-attended and valuable breakout sessions on OpenDaylight, the Functest and Yardstick testing projects, and a session on the entire OPNFV testing ecosystem. Many of the lessons from these sessions were immediately applied in the lab. All lessons from the entire Plugfest will be fed back into OPNFV Certification & Compliance Committee efforts.

As we look to the future, we hope to expand future Plugfests to multiple geographic locations. This will allow OPNFV to test our multisite applications. We will also concentrate on new use cases made possible by the Colorado release. As with this Plugfest, OPNFV will continue to reach out to other communities to get a broader spectrum of users involved in NFV application development.

About the author of this post

Tetsuya Nakamura

Tetsuya Nakamura is a Principal Systems Architect at CableLabs and member of the OPNFV Board of Directors.

Susan James, head of Product Line NFV Infrastructure, Business Unit Cloud & IP, Ericsson, will deliver a keynote at the OPNFV Summit  titled “Making OPNFV the Platform for Industry Growth”

Tell us about your involvement in the OPNFV project and where you’re currently integrating open source networking solutions.

For the Colorado release, Ericsson is leading five projects within OPNFV and we are also contributing to 15 more projects. Being an active member from the beginning, we started out heavily invested in the infrastructure-type projects and building the community. We have also been very involved in the testing and SDN- related feature projects.

Two of the projects we’re leading in OPNFV are: Service Function Chaining (SFC) and SDN  Distributed Routing and VPN (SDN VPN), which are both focused on adding advanced networking features to the OPNFV platform. The SFC project is about creating a reference solution for Service Function Chaining based on the SFC implementation in OpenDaylight. The SDN VPN project is about adding E2E orchestration of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) using the OpenStack Neutron Stadium project called BGPVPN, which provides an extension of the Neutron API for managing VPNs and corresponding extensions to Heat. In OPNFV, we are combining this with the OpenDaylight VPN Service, which is one of the backends BGPVPN supports.

What is your perspective on the evolving relationships among standards, open source, and vendors? What could each of these do better?

It’s taking shape, much thanks to initiatives like OPNFV. As with previous standardization activities, it is about working together; vendors, operators and interested parties working to establish a market and ensure that this can be done in multi-vendor environments. In addition to standards, we are taking advantage of working with open source as well so we get the best of both worlds. We will see more open source and community work in the future, and getting to actual implementation rather than discussing on paper is key for progression.

What new technology or trend in the networking space are you most curious about and why?

The new trend we see coming full speed for next year is about hardware evolution and acceleration such as SmartNIC, especially for Telco NFV deployment. It would be interesting to see OPNFV share some common vision on this and kick off some related activities.

What do you see as hurdles to broad industry adoption of NFV?

Confidence. I think that we have solved a number of the key issues that have been what I would call hygiene factors. Now it is about understanding not only what this means from a technology transformation perspective, but also what this means from an operations perspective. This is why we see the focus shifting towards MANO and how that transformation will take place as automation will be key to the success of the journey. Interoperability will continue to be a focus as this is not something that comes for free. It requires all parties to continue to work together to make this happen.

Please give us a preview of what you’ll be sharing on-stage at OPNFV Summit.

Virtualization is now starting to happen and I will be talking about what various service providers see as the main drivers for it. One driver is certainly improved automation capabilities. I will discuss some reflections and experiences from early NFV deployments. Furthermore, I will talk about the role of OPNFV going forward as networks evolve towards 5G and IoT.