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Nov 10
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Making OPNFV Work

By Blog

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 TallgrenTapio 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.

Nov 02
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OPNFV Welcomes Leading Technology Organizations China Telecom, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics

By Announcements

Open Source NFV project expands its member base as global telecom, wireless, digital media, and research organizations commit to accelerating open source NFV

SAN FRANCISCO, November 2, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing today announced four new member organizations.

New Silver members include China Telecom,Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm, Inc., and Samsung Electronics, while the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) joins as an Associate member. The addition of an end user organization, a research institution and two major global vendors signals a maturing of both the project and NFV as technology. Launched just over two years ago, the OPNFV project is supported by a vibrant group of 55 member companies committed to advancing a flexible, open source framework for NFV.

“Continued growth and diversity among our member roster is a testament to the growing power of open, collaborative development within the networking industry,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “I’m honored to welcome China Telecom, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Qualcomm, and Samsung Electronics to the project. Together with our existing member base and strong community, these key organizations will help accelerate the adoption of open source NFV.”

About the newest members

China Telecom Corporation Limited is one of the world’s largest and leading integrated information service operators, providing wireline and mobile telecommunications services, Internet access services, information services, and other value-added telecommunications services primarily in the People’s Republic of China. At the end of 2015, the company had wireline access lines in service of about 134 million customers, wireline broadband subscribers of about 113 million, and mobile subscribers of about 198 million.

“China Telecom has long supported NFV technologies and we strongly believe in the power of open source to both accelerate development and reduce complexity,” said Shen Shaoai, vice general manager of Technology Department, China Telecom. “Joining OPNFV and working more collaboratively across the industry is crucial as we strive to virtualize 80 percent of our network functions by 2025. We’re looking forward to contributing our expertise to help build a strong, open NFV platform.”

With more than 25 years of experience, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) has a long history in building Next Generation Network Infrastructures with tier one operators and key manufactures worldwide. Research concentrates on technical infrastructure as well as the development of practical concepts, prototypes, and applications in a pre-competitive environment. In this context open source toolkits developed by FOKUS, such as the SIP Express Router and the Open Source IMS Core, as well as the most recent Open Baton platform, have been landmarks for performing initial PoCs and paving the way for efficient and successful network and service transformation towards 5G. With around 430 employees, FOKUS is one of the largest Fraunhofer institutes.

“As networks transform and become more agile, it’s important that the industry come together to work collectively on open solutions,” said Dr. Thomas Magedanz, director of the Software-based Networks business unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS. “We’re excited to be joining the OPNFV community as a natural step for contributing our resources and expertise in areas such as MANO that will help to build a stronger open source NFV platform globally.”

Qualcomm Incorporated is a world leader in 3G, 4G and next-generation wireless technologies. For more than 30 years, Qualcomm ideas and inventions have driven the evolution of digital communications, linking people everywhere more closely to information, entertainment and each other.

“Rapid evolution in the way people consume data, especially as we move towards 5G, requires agile and scalable solutions to meet the increasing demands of the world’s networks,” Ram Peddibhotla, senior director, product management, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. “Through our collaboration in the OPNFV community, we’re eager to harness the power of open source to accelerate open network transformation.”

Samsung Electronics inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies. The Company is redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices,tablets, cameras, digital appliances, printers, medical equipment, network systems, and semiconductor and LED solutions.

“Explosive demand for data requires the networking ecosystem to constantly reinvent itself with the introduction of new technologies and innovations,” said Woojune Kim, vice president and head of strategy group, Next Generation Communication Team at Samsung Electronics.“We believe in an open approach to addressing the growing reliance on virtualized technologies like NFV. Joining OPNFV will help enable faster and broader adoption of more interoperable network infrastructures, and we look forward to working collaboratively across the industry.”

For information on on how to participate in the OPNFV project or to learn more about OPNFV Colorado, the project’s third and most recent platform release, visit: https://www.opnfv.org.

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) 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. For more information, please visit http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.

Oct 06
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Skinned Knees and Strong Wills: Celebrating Two Years as a Project

By Blog

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.

OPNFV 2 Years InfographicHowever, 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 KirkseyHeather Kirksey

Heather Kirksey
Director, OPNFV

Sep 26
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OPNFV’s Colorado Release: Breaking Barriers

By Blog

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
Christopher PriceChris 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.

Sep 26
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Open Source NFV Project Delivers Third Platform Release, Introduces More Mature Features and Processes

By Announcements

OPNFV Colorado lays foundation for NFV applications and services via key feature enhancements, greater integration and additional testing capabilities

SAN FRANCISCO, September 26, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing today announced the availability of OPNFV Colorado, the project’s third platform release. Built on a strong underlying foundation, Colorado includes critical advances that accelerate the development of NFV applications and services through key feature enhancements across security, IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), testing, VPN capabilities, and support for multiple hardware architectures.

“Colorado represents a more robust version of OPNFV’s previous Brahmaputra platform,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “The OPNFV community, in close collaboration with other upstream communities, has delivered enhanced capabilities most important to the NFV platform growth and maturity.”

Key enhancements available in OPNFV Colorado include:

  • Core feature upgrades. These improvements come via focused collaboration with upstream communities and are centered on improving foundational support for NFV applications and services. All feature enhancements are integrated into the automated install/deploy/testing framework.
    • Enhanced security by earning the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices in open source development; additionally, the Moon project has been prototyping identity federation and management for OpenStack and OpenDaylight.
    • Service Function Chaining (SFC) now runs across multiple nodes, includes installer support for VNF Manager (Tacker) installation and support for enhanced cloud scenarios.
    • Improved IPv6 support includes IPv6-only deployments, full underlay and overlay support and integration with additional install tools.
    • The SDN VPN project now enables full Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN support including BGP peering.
    • Full support for multiple hardware architectures, including both ARM® and x86 architectures.
  • Enhanced testing capabilities. Colorado includes a greater integration across testing projects with additional feature testing capabilities, and increased automation.
  • Infrastructure and testing environment advancements. The Phros Test Lab project continues to be a key element of OPNFV release development and validation. Colorado brings increased governance, consistency, availability and quality to the labs, increasing efficiency and ccreating the groundwork for a robust Lab-as-a-Service program. See the full list of Pharos labs –including those participating in Colorado–here.
  • Community expansion. Improved cross-project collaboration via working groups focused on Management and Operation (MANO), Infrastructure, Security, and Testing. Five Committers-At-Large members have been elected to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) to enhance the meritocratic nature of the project. OPNFV also continues to build relationships with key upstream communities such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenContrail, FD.io, OVS, Open-O, OpenBaton, KVM, DPDK, ODP, and Linux. Additionally, OPNFV launched its intern program during the Colorado release timeframe, already providing valuable contributions across work on the Pharos Labs, VNF on-boarding and CINDR performance testing.
  • Efficient network forwarding. Colorado introduces scenarios created by the FastDataStacks project which include the VPP software supplied bu the FD.io project to enable high-performance networking for NFV. More information on FastDataStacks can be found here.

“We’re seeing a maturity of process with the Colorado release, reflected by things like achievement of the CII Best Practices badge for security and the growing maturity of our testing and DevOps methodology,” said Chris Price, TSC chair, OPNFV and Open Source Manager for SDN, Cloud & NFV, Ericsson. “The creation of working groups across MANO, Infrastructure, Security, and Testing also help the project evolve towards a foundational and robust industry platform for advanced open source NFV.”

In addition to enhanced features and capabilities of the platform, the third OPNFV release has provided an opportunity for the community to become even more fluent in system level feature development and testing in support of NFV. This will be crucial in moving past the initial groundwork and into ease-of-deployment and end-user engagement as the platform continues to mature. Colorado sets the stage for significant new work in the MANO area including efforts focused on VNF on-boarding, increased CI/CD integration with upstream communities and ongoing NFV-related feature enhancements that will further accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.

OPNFV is at the OpenDaylight Summit in Seattle this week, September 27-29. The community will participate in various presentations throughout the Summit and will host an OPNFV MeetUp onsite.

The second OPNFV Plugfest will be held December 5-9, 2016 at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab in Durham, New Hampshire. The event will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in three key areas of testing: OPNFV Deployment, Network Integration, and VNF Applications. Both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend.

Information about OPNFV Colorado is available here: https://www.opnfv.org/colorado.

To learn more about OPNFV Colorado, or for information on how to participate in the OPNFV project, visit: https://www.opnfv.org.

Comments from key project contributors:

Bob Monkman, project technical lead for Armband project and segment marketing manager at ARM:

“OPNFV Colorado is an important new release as it continues the momentum towards a future-proof network based on multi-architectural solutions. The OPNFV Project is rapidly building an open, mature and integrated foundation to deliver NFV and we are engaged on a number of fronts, importantly on the Armband Project in open developer labs around the world.”

Bin Hu, Project Technical Lead for IPv6 project and PMTS at AT&T:

“With Colorado, we expanded upon the existing IPv6 support in Brahmaputra to now include overlay and underlay support and added support for additional install tools, including Apex, so support IPv6-only deployments.  An important step for the platform, this brings advantages such as more efficient routing, more efficient packet processing, direct data flows, simplified network configuration, and enhanced security provided by a rapidly-growing IPv6 underlay infrastructure.”

Frank Brockners, Project Technical Lead for the FastDataStacks project and Distinguished Engineer, Cisco:

“To date, NFV stacks have been missing an esasy-to-extend, feature-rich, high-performance/scale virtual switch-router –integrated into a versatile stack architecture that can work with a variety of software and hardware forwarders. In Colorado with the FastDataStacks project, we have now overcome this hurdle and introduced a first OPNFV scenario that integrates the vector packet processor (VPP) as supplied by the FD.io project while leveraging OpenDaylight Group-Based Policy (BGP) as the integration vehicle.”

Brady Johnson, Project Technical Lead for SFC project and Principal Software Engineer at Ericsson:

“In the OPNFV Colorado release, SFC improves on the foundation laid in the Brahmaputra release by enhancing the stability of most of the upstream components that make up the project. We can now support more flexible and multi-node NSH networking scenarios. OPNFV, working with upstream teams, can now enable scenarios and network agility important to end users.”

Luke Hinds, Key project lead, CII Best Practice Badge and principal software engineer, RedHat:

“Security of the OPNFV ecosystem is critical to the trust and integrity of our community’s endeavor. The security posture of OPNFV is enhanced in Colorado by achievement of the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices, and a full security code audit carried out by the OPNFV security working group. Colorado also includes two new security projects that set more secure standards movin forward: the Moon project prototypes identity federation for OpenStack and OpenDaylight and a second project which performs automated CI NFVi Security Scanning.”

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) 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. For more information, please visit  http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.

Additional Resources

How to Participate

Download OPNFV Colorado

OPNFV Resources

OPNFV Blog

Sep 14
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Security Working Group Shares How OPNFV Earned a CII Best Practices Badge

By Blog

CII Best Practices Badge

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.

Sep 06
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MEDIA ADVISORY: Open Source NFV Project to Host 2017 Summit in Beijing

By Announcements

Registration, sponsorship information available for 3rd Annual OPNFV Summit to take place in Beijing, China, June 12-15, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO, September 6, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced the 2017 OPNFV Summit will be held in Beijing, China, June 12-15, 2017 at the JW Marriott Beijing. The Summit provides an opportunity to reach the innovative communities, developers and companies transforming the networking industry through open source NFV.

Registration for the 2017 OPNFV Summit is available here. Those interested in sponsoring the event can find more details here. Additional information, including the Call for Proposals, agendas and co-located events will be available in the coming months, so check the OPNFV Summit website for updates.

“With such a growing and vibrant global community, we’re looking forward to holding our 2017 OPNFV Summit in Beijing,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Our community is truly global, with strong contributions and growth from across Asia. Hosting our next Summit in China will allow an even broader participation in OPNFV from developers, end users, academia and others passionate about transforming the network.”

The second OPNFV Summit, held June 20-23, 2016 in Berlin, was a great success with 620 attendees from across the NFV ecosystem. A recap of the event, including presentation slides, videos, photos and more, are available here: https://www.opnfv.org/opnfv-summit-2016-event-recap.

About OPNFV

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit  http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Media Inquires

Jill Lovato
OPNFV Project
pr@opnfv.org

Aug 18
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OPNFV Creates End User Advisory Group to Inform Project’s Technical Direction and Approach

By Announcements

Open Source NFV project leverages real-world expertise of key networking experts from leading carriers and service providers including AT&T, China Mobile, Cox Communications, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, Sprint and more  

 SAN FRANCISCO, August 18, 2016 — The OPNFV Project, a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), today announced the project has formed an End User Advisory Group (EUAG) consisting of end-user organizations from both OPNFV members and nonmembers to provide technical guidance to the OPNFV developer community.

Founding members include:

  • AT&T’s Toby Ford, assistant vice president of Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Architecture and Strategy; Bryan Sullivan, director of Open Source Strategy; and Steven Wright, lead member of Technical Staff
  • British Telecom’s Milind Bhagwat, enterprise architect and technology strategy lead
  • CableLabs’ Don Clarke, principal network architect; Randy Levensalor, lead software architect; and Tetsuya Nakamura, principal systems architect
  • China Mobile’s Lingli Deng, project manager
  • China Unicom’s Chuan Jia and Junjie Tong from the Network Technology Research Institute of China Unicom, Department of Network Technology Research
  • Cox Communications’ Guy Meador, senior strategic architect; and Jeff Finkelstein, executive director of Advanced Access Architecture
  • Deutsche Telekom’s Herbert Damker, senior expert, Group Technology
  • Fidelity Investment’s Carlos Matos, director of global network architecture
  • Liberty Global’s Uzari Firoze, manager, Business-to-Business Network Design
  • KDDI’s Hajime Miyamoto, senior engineer and Kenichi Ogaki, assistant manager
  • KDDI Lab’s Masanori Miyazawa, research manager
  • Orange’s Morgan Richomme, NFV architect
  • SK Telecom’s Sungho Jo, head of 5G Tech Lab, Network Technology R&D Center
  • Sprint’s Serge Manning, senior technology strategist, Global Standards
  • Telecom Italia’s Cecilia Corbi, standardization manager
  • Telefonica’s Diego Lopez, senior technology expert
  • Telia Company’s Johan Gustawsson, network architect, SDN and NFV
  • Vodafone Group’s David Amzallag, group head of Network Virtualization, SDN and NFV; and Kodi Atuchukwu, network virtualisation architect, Vodafone Ocean

Created to provide a forum for end users to assist and support the project’s objectives by providing technical and strategic guidance to the OPNFV governing bodies (including the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), the Board of Directors and the Certification & Compliance Committee), the EUAG is comprised of members experienced in running some of the world’s most cutting-edge networks.

“The formation of the OPNFV EUAG will harness the knowledge and expertise of those responsible for actually running real-world networks as they deploy and scale,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “Feedback from the ecosystem using and deploying NFV is crucial to the future direction of OPNFV. Engaging these pioneers will help us address the most pressing pain points for the industry and build a platform with broad applicability.”

The EUAG meets monthly to discuss key challenges, standards, network architecture, and emerging use cases related to NFV. The first meeting was held June 26, 2016 and the next meeting is scheduled for August 31. The group is chaired by AT&T’s Steven Wright, who will serve a two-year term while delegates may serve for as long as they like. EUAG member eligibility includes individuals at network operators (service providers–cloud or network, telco or cable operators, enterprises, government or educational institutions) who have current or prior experience in a) management of a production deployed network, b) architecting of a production deployed network, or c) serving as network software or hardware decision maker.

“AT&T values the industry interoperability efforts pioneered by OPNFV to enable a VNF ecosystem,” said Steven Wright, lead member of technical staff at AT&T and chair of the OPNFV EUAG. “We are excited to be more active in this community by contributing code directly and with vendors.”

More details on the OPNFV EUAG can be found here, including the group’s Wiki page, official Charter and Member Agreement. EUAG meeting minutes are public and posted to the EUAG wiki page. New members are welcome to join the group at any time; requests to join and questions should be sent to: user-advisory@opnfv.org.

Comments from founding OPNFV EUAG members (in alphabetical order by company name)

Milind Bhagwat, British Telecom: “BT has been instrumental in the development of NFV and continues to heavily leverage this technology to make our network services more dynamic. We’ve learned that integration between legacy and new implementations is critical in determining the speed at which networks can be transformed. I’m pleased to be able to bring BT’s experience and perspectives to the OPNFV EUAG.”

Don Clarke, CableLabs: “CableLabs is tasked with developing technologies and standards on behalf of the cable industry. As a founding member of OPNFV we are keen to see the community address the needs of network operators for a reliable and replicable NFV platform based on open source. The EUAG will enable end users to share their experience with the platform, and provide useful guidance to the community on priorities for focused and timely development.”

Lingli Deng, China Mobile: “OPNFV continues to gain more experience with integration and delivering more and more stable and mature releases. End users are able to provide invaluable insights into deploying OPNFV releases, business demands and their impact on the network, and conducting PoCs/trials. This greatly benefits the community and helps ensure practical and successful OPNFV deployments.”

Morgan Richomme, Orange: “Orange has been involved in OPNFV since day one. We are actively contributing to several projects around the ecosystem and actually speeding up the selection process of the best open source components for NFV. The OPNFV EUAG will be the perfect place to get in touch with business owners, share best practices and concerns. As a contributor, we expect the initiative to help consolidate our position, especially in the testing area. Another goal is also to encourage end users to contribute more in order to shape OPNFV for the enterprise.”

Serge Manning, Sprint: “This advisory group will be an important forum for those of us in the trenches – the technologists that are running real-world networks – to guide and accelerate the adoption of open source NFV.”

Diego Lopez, Telefonica: “The open playground OPNFV aims to establish is a very valuable element of a thriving ecosystem for NFV, easing the collection of requirements for upstream projects like OSM, and facilitating their validation and experimentation by potential users. Furthermore, OPNFV provides an interesting common ground for further research activities in the NFV technologies themselves and in advanced application environments like 5G.”

Johan Gustawsson, Telia Company: “By engaging directly with a handful of OPNFV upstream projects and witnessing its broad industry traction, it’s clear the project is highly credible and brings together various components to accelerate the development and adoption of an open end-to-end platform for NFV. Through this newly formed advisory group, I believe we can achieve a strong level of engagement and collaboration with operator peers and the broader community to address common challenges.”

OPNFV recently hosted its annual Summit in Berlin on June 22-23, 2016. The Summit brought together 620 members of the OPNFV community including network operators, vendors,  developers and end users. Eighteen service provider companies–including several from our EUAG– were in attendance to participate in a keynote panel, six PoC Demos, and as speakers in more than 25 track sessions. To watch OPNFV Director Heather Kirksey’s opening keynote or view presentation slides, photos and other content from the Summit visit the recap page here.

About the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV)

Open Platform for NFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source flexible platform intended to accelerate the introduction of new products and services using NFV. It brings together service providers, vendors and users to collaborate in an open forum on advancing the state-of-the-art in NFV. For more information, please visit  http://www.opnfv.org.

OPNFV is Collaborative Project at the Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org.

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OPNFV Blog

Jul 12
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OPNFV Security in Focus

By Blog

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 HindsLuke 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.

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