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OPNFV Brahmaputra Begins to Emerge at OpenDaylight Summit

By August 7, 2015January 18th, 2017Blog

Our community is transitioning from the Arno release—where we constrained release activities to include only five projects—to our Brahmaputra release, where we may have more than thirty projects participating! This last week, the OPNFV community gathered at the OpenDaylight Summit for the first coordinated Developer Summit following our inaugural release, Arno. The focus of our community at the event was fittingly shared between collaboration with the OpenDaylight community and establishing our release plans for the next OPNFV release, Brahmaputra.

The OPNFV project in it’s essence collaborates and works with our upstream source communities to bring new and needed technologies to the industry, and we try to facilitate that by co-locating our events with other important upstream communities. While collaboration with the OpenDaylight community was top-of-mind, we were fortunate to schedule a combined session with OPNFV, OpenDaylight and representatives from the ETSI NFV ISG. We are grateful to the OpenDaylight community, similarly to the OpenStack community, for being receptive to having the OPNFV community co-locate our activities at their respective summits.

OPNFV Hackfest

As expected, the focus of collaboration last week was highly network-centric and the OPNFV community benefited greatly from the wealth of networking expertise accessible at the OpenDaylight Summit. It was satisfying to participate in and observe discussions between the groups covering topics from scale and resilience, through protocol and overlay technologies, to policy and topology of virtual networks. As a user community of OpenDaylight, intent on exposing the values provided by the controller platform, OPNFV looks forward to seeing the seeds sown during these days together grow to fruition for future releases.

For OPNFV, the balance between working with open source communities and SDO’s is a challenge we face on a daily basis. Having the opportunity to participate in a joint session with a delegation from the ETSI NFV ISG while at the OpenDaylight Summit provided an in-person touch point across these domains. The team from ETSI NFV ISG raised a number of key use cases around deployment and lifecycle management of SDN controllers in the context of infrastructure and there was a good chance to converge on the testing activities across groups.

Brahmaputra planning, which is top of mind for our community today, provides the next major challenge for OPNFV and a clear priority for us during the summit. Debra Scott, our OPNFV release manager, led a number of sessions and one-on-one discussions with the community and project leaders to establish a foundation for our Brahmaputra release. While this may sound like business as usual, the challenge is immense.

A key takeaway from the event was that our community is really coming to terms with working through the process of taking concept to an upstream development community; then integrating, validating and leveraging the results to deliver cloud platform features. To have established such an understanding across the community in such a short time and with so few iterations speaks to the clarity of vision and intent across OPNFV.

I fully expect Brahmaputra to provide the first demonstration of our ability to work effectively with our upstream communities. And with the growing number of upstream-focused activities across OPNFV, there will be no shortage of features available in our “C” release.

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.