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Making OPNFV Work

By November 10, 2016January 18th, 2017Blog

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.