New releases from ONAP and OPNFV advance NFV testing, orchestration & automation, as Accenture joins at the Gold level
San Francisco, December 4, 2018 – LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects, today announced continued progress to ease deployments across the open source networking stack. New platform releases from ONAP (Casablanca) and OPNFV (Gambia) bring additional support for cross-stack deployments across new and existing use cases such as 5G and Cross-Carrier VPN (CCVPN), as well as enhancements to cloud-native VPN. Additionally, the organization’s compliance and verification program recently announced its expansion into virtual network functions (VNF) testing and is now recruiting Beta participants. VNF testing will help ease deployment pains and improve VNF quality and interoperability across real-world deployments.
“New and enhanced deployments of our platforms are popping up every day across the globe, and with tighter cross-community integration and an expanded compliance and verification program, we are well-positioned to facilitate innovative industry progress,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, the Linux Foundation. “The latest releases of ONAP and OPNFV usher in a new era for LFN as the community continues to foster an expanding commercial ecosystem.”
“We are pleased with the continued growth and the diversity of contributors to ONAP, a key project within Linux Foundation Networking. The Casablanca release is a major step forward for this effort. With wide-scale service provider and equipment supplier participation, ONAP is becoming the de facto automation platform for carrier grade service provider networks,” said Chris Rice, senior vice president of Network Cloud & Infrastructure at AT&T and Board Chair, LF Networking. “AT&T remains committed to actively contributing new code; leading technical areas; partnering on new 5G initiatives; orchestrating services across VNFs, PNFs, and soon CNFs (Container Network Functions), as well as developing leading edge, model driven platform enhancements like the Controller Design Studio.”
New Platform Releases Enhance Deployability
Together, LFN projects are crossing the open networking chasm by maturing capabilities that enhance deployability across an expanding commercial ecosystem. Supported by a growing list of top vendors, carriers, and other organizations, ONAP — which brings together top global carriers and vendors with the goal of allowing end users to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions — has expanded into a truly scalable platform with multiple, parallel threads. OPNFV — a system-level integrations, deployment, testing and feature development project — advances the state of NFV around cloud native and moves toward implementing continuous delivery (CD) to better support DevOps (a model that is growing importance to communication service providers) and infrastructure automation.
Key enhancements included in each release:
- ONAP Casablanca introduces two new blueprints, sets the stage for a rich VNF ecosystem to emerge around ONAP, demonstrates community expansion, and adds new functionality making ONAP suitable for global deployment.
- Building on a common theme of automation enhancements across LFN, OPNFV Gambia progresses the state of NFV around continuous delivery, cloud native network functions (CNFs), testing, carrier-grade NFVI features and upstream project integration. OPNFV was a pioneer with NFV continuous integration and is now taking a first step towards DevOps and continuous delivery.
Compliance and Verification Expands
Concurrently, expansion of the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) is underway. Initially started as a program to test and verify the readiness and availability of commercial NFV NFVI/VIM products based on OPNFV functional testing capabilities, OVP is broadening its purview in 2019 to include testing and verification of VNF applications as well as third-party lab support. VNF testing will soon be in beta with active code that includes VNFSDK testing code. Vendors are encouraged to participate by submitting their VNFs for early testing to help shape the direction and future of virtualized deployments.
More details on ONAP Casablanca are available at this link and details on OPNFV Gambia can be found here. To learn about how to get involved in the compliance and verification program – or to submit a VNF for testing – send queries to verified@opnfv.org.
Accenture Joins LFN
Additionally, LFN is excited to announce that Accenture has joined the project at the Gold level. Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Accenture joins additional Gold members Aptira, Inocybe Technologies, Lumina Networks, Microsoft and Telstra.
“ONAP continues to make great progress to help the industry evolve toward programmable network platform architecture via groundbreaking innovation and the ability to orchestrate cross-domain services,” said Amol Phadke, a managing director at Accenture and the company’s Global Network Strategy and Portfolio lead. “We are bringing a comprehensive and customizable ‘as a Service’ solution to the ONAP community that service providers can leverage and operationalize using a vendor-agnostic open-source approach.”
Upcoming Community Events
LFN will be onsite at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle, December 10-13, 2018. Join us to learn how LFN projects enable cloud native network functions (CNFs) and integrate across the container landscape. More information about the event, including registration, full agenda and details on the co-located FD.io Mini Summit, are available here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america-2018/.
The next ONAP Developer Design Forum will be conducted jointly with the OPNFV Gambia Plugfest in Paris, France from January 8-11, 2019. The event will focus on Dublin release planning and explore various synergies with OPNFV as well as provide a forum for beta testing VNF compliance. Both members and non-members are welcome to attend the co-located events. Learn more here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/onap-ddf-opnfv-plugfest/
Supporting Comments from LFN Members: https://www.onap.org/announcement/2018/12/04/onap-casablanca-supporting-comments-from-members
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
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Additional Resources
Download ONAP Casablanca
Get the ONAP Architectural Whitepaper
Get the ONAP 5G Blueprint Overview
Get the ONAP CCVPM Blueprint Overview
Download OPNFV Gambia
OPNFV Verified Program
Join LFN as a Member
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