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Swimming in the Brahmaputra: What’s Ahead for the Next OPNFV Release

By December 16, 2015January 18th, 2017Blog

BrahmaputraThe OPNFV community is hard at work on our second release, Brahmaputra, planned for February 2016. We’ve just hit Milestone D, which means the release is API and feature-complete! As we work to finalize the release, we wanted to provide a quick sneak peek into what’s ahead.

For Brahmaputra we are aiming to have a lab-ready release of the platform which means a focus on further stability of the deployment, new features, projects and enhanced documentation. It should serve not only as a stepping stone for users to begin to familiarize themselves with the platform and start with early development and testing, but it will bring additional use cases and functionality useful for network operators. A great example of this is the beginnings of Service Function Chaining via the SFC project, as well as integration with Open vSwitch, and KVM for NFV, among others.

Specific highlights of what you can expect to see in Brahmaputra include:

  • More projects! While Arno featured a total of five participating projects, Brahmaputra is looking at close to 40! For a list of participating projects and activities in Brahmaputra look no further than here.
  • Support for more SDN controllers. Brahmaputra will support additional SDN controllers, including ONOSFW and OpenContrail in addition to OpenDaylight from Arno.
  • Added installers. Installer technologies continue to be an area of growth and exploration for the datacenter.  By providing technology choices like Compass, TripleO, Juju and Fuel, the OPNFV community is able to work with activities and exploration in areas such as automated deployment and management of OpenStack and other distributed systems. The community offers needed capabilities to the OPNFV Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline to support flexible OPNFV platform deployments.
  • Support for ARM-based servers. The Armband project is designed to simply integrate and test Brahmaputra on ARM-based servers. The goal is to replicate an OPNFV software build, Continuous Integration, lab provisioning, and testing processes so Brahmaputra can be available on both x86 and ARM architecture-based servers.
  • Increased community lab infrastructure. Our community testbed labs, the Pharos Community Labs project, continues to grow! We’re currently at 10 functional labs across the globe, with more in the works. For Brahmaputra, Pharos Community Labs will also be used for release testing in addition to the OPNFV hardware at the Linux Foundation.

We can’t wait to see where the community takes this next release as we get closer to advancing open source NFV!  More details on the Brahmaputra release plan are available here, and check back often for updates.

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.