Fostering Cross-Industry NFV Collaboration

The networking industry is currently undergoing a huge transformation as demand for network bandwidth increases exponentially. Both the technology itself (e.g., evolution across software, cloud, SDN, NFV, containers, virtualization, and orchestration) and the way in which service providers, operators, and vendors structure their business is evolving at record pace. The entire industry is becoming more nimble and agile to keep up with demand.

I blogged recently about the role of NFV in this transformation and how the OPNFV project is at the forefront; we’re tasked with creating a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate new NFV products and services. And while the reality of transformation is that it’s a hard, risky and challenging journey, the industry is ripe for change. OPNFV’s second platform release, Brahmaputra, helps set the stage for the NFV ecosystem to start actualizing NFV with a lab-ready framework.

Focused on preparing a viable starting point for evolving NFV use cases and composing services in a lab environment, the release is the first iteration of a massively parallel simultaneous release process. At a high level, it puts into place the processes and infrastructure that will allow us to scale up and out as we march towards NFV deployments. (Check out our recent ONS Webinar, “OPNFV Brahmaputra: An Early Look –Approach, Architecture Overview, Upstream Integration and Readiness” for a detailed discussion of enhancements delivered in OPNFV Brahmaputra. )

But it’s not just OPNFV. The entire industry is involved in the development of NFV, and the unique role that OPNFV plays is to foster collaboration among key stakeholders across the entire ecosystem. The strength of any open source project depends on the community involved in developing it. As the industry comes together to further NFV, we’re seeing the OPNFV community grow; as Brahmaputra integrates multiple open source and standards projects. This fosters feature development, testing, deploy and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment domains. Thirty-five projects and more than 140 developers were involved in the Brahmaputra release (in fact, participation in OPNFV as a whole has increased five times since August of 2015!).

Despite this rapid growth, our journey is still in its infancy and we have a long way to go. Anyone and everyone interested in accelerating open source NFV is welcome to join us. Have ideas for use cases or integration? See something that’s missing? If a project interests you, join it. See a need for OPNFV not currently addressed? Start a new project. Hang out on our IRC channels. Check out the wiki. Join our meetings and bring your thoughts, passion and ideas!

We’re excited to engage with the open networking industry at the Open Networking Summit March 14-17 in Santa Clara, CA, and we invite you to join us:

• We’re hosting a two-day OPNFV Hackfest March 14 and 15, focused on planning for the next release.

• Check out the OPNFV sessions during the event, covering a range of topics including how OPNFV works with other open source networking projects, analysis of service chaining approaches, and how OPNFV is accelerating open source NFV for and with end users.  

• Come to our ONS Evening Reception co-sponsored by OpenDaylight, OpenStack, and DevOps Networking Forum, Monday, March 14 at Levi Stadium. RSVP here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/V65Y3DF

• Stop by our booth on the show floor.