Highlights from OPNFV’s first week
When the OPNFV Project launched last week there was a lot of excitement surrounding the news with carriers and vendors alike showing tremendous support. Significant work has been done to scope what Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) means for the telecom industry. Now with OPNFV we undertake a project determined to evolve and validate these assumptions.
Our first week was spent coalescing the energy and support of the community into communicable activity and a plan. It is an exciting time to be involved, as the community is coming together on the practical side of these initial discussions to establish integral activities and direction.
With the help of the Linux Foundation, we hosted our first community HackFest with more than 70 people in attendance. In addition, we ran the inaugural Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meeting to start laying a foundation from which we can build a vibrant developer community and the infrastructure that will sustain the project.
The first order of business for the TSC was to jumpstart a discussion about the community’s first release slated for 2015. These discussions, ably facilitated by members of the TSC, uncovered more than 30 project ideas about features, the development process, collaboration with upstream projects, establishing a release protocol and much more. This ideation, coupled with the willingness from those present to understand and cooperate, gives me confidence that we have established a project with meaningful objectives. All progress on the project will be communicated through the developer wiki.
One of our foremost objectives is to develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate NFV functionality. While it is clear that in the short term we will need to converge on a few fundamental projects to establish our baseline release, I expect to see a broad range of project proposals make their way onto the wiki as our community finds its rhythm.
The role of the TSC is to work with upstream communities, guide the release process and help determine which projects will be included in the OPNFV architecture for the first release. Our weekly calls are open to the public and we encourage all to join and provide input.
One of the great benefits of open source is the inherent conviction that many minds are better than one — the more people who participate, share ideas, debate and argue, the better the code to the benefit of the entire industry.
I would like to offer an open invitation to anyone who is interested in this project to participate in the OPNFV open source community, regardless of affiliation or location. If you have a technology contribution, concept or idea, you can share it here. Join the discussions, listen to the debates and come help us make open source NFV a reality for all.
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.