Open source communities thrive on healthy arguments and collaboration to develop code that can solve real world problems. In the past few weeks the OPNFV community had two such face-to-face meeting opportunities. Developers from our community, from around the world and different companies came together at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Santa Rosa and at Prague where we were able to socialize with members of the nearby ETSI NFV ISG #9 conference. It was great to engage in person with those who we most often communicate with virtually.
In Santa Rosa we took a deeper dive into the technical details of delivering on the OPNFV vision. OPNFV is unique as it is an end-to-end integration virtualization project, which means that understanding the dynamics and collaborating with other upstream open source projects is critical to its success. Our technical discussions focused on ‘what and how’ of integrating features from projects like OpenDaylight, OpenStack, KVM and Open vSwitch into the OPNFV platform. The summit also offered a perfect milieu for us to mingle with the Linux, KVM and container experts, among others.
A week later in Prague, the community had intense discussions and debates about the details of the first software release. We discussed the progress, changes and updates to the work of our continuous integration, deployment, infrastructure and testing teams. For the first release, the technical steering committee decided on a time-based release aimed at establishing core project infrastructure, and providing a baseline platform for development and experimentation. An important outcome of the planning was the establishment of concise project dependencies and time constraints associated with key milestones and events in the coming months. Our goal is to have the hardware infrastructure up and running shortly to provide a convergence point for the projects and launch the first code release in April.
Beyond all the intense planning sessions and tiring schedules, what stood out was the enthusiasm and knowledge exhibited by the community in addressing the challenges and building the code. If there is one thing I have learnt working with our community leaders is that there is a pervasive desire to succeed. With clarity on our targets, challenges and goals we can now hone in on key activities and work toward the first OPNFV milestone. We welcome you to participate in the discussions and share your knowledge as we get ready to deliver our first release.
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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.