OPNFV Day at OpenStack Summit

By Tony Dempsey

I’m here attending the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, BC and wanted to find out more about OPNFV, a cross industry initiative to develop a reference architecture for operators to use as a reference for their NFV deployments. Intel is a leading contributor to OPNFV, and I was keen to find out more, so I attended a special event being held as part of the conference.

Heather Kirksey (OPNFV Director) kicked off today’s event by describing what OPNFV is all about, including the history around why OPNFV was formed as well as an overview on what areas OPNFV is focused on. OPNFV is a carrier-grade integrated open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services, which was an initiative coming out of the ETSI SIG group and its initial focus is on the NFVI layer.

OPNFV’s first release will be called Arno (naming is themed on names of rivers) and will include OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and Open vSwitch.  No date for the release is available just yet but is thought to be soon. Notably, Arno is expected to be used in lab environments initially, versus a commercial deployment. High Availability (HA) will be part of the first release (control and deployment side is supported). The plan is to make OpenStack Telco-Grade instead of trying to make a Telco-Grade version of OpenStack. AT&T gave an example as to how they were going to use the initial Arno release.  As an example of how this release will be implemented, AT&T indicated they going to bring the Arno release into their lab, add additional elements to it, and test for performance and security. They see this release very much as a means to uncover gaps in open source projects, help identify fixes and upstream these fixes. OPNFV is committed to working with the upstream communities to ensure a good relationship.  Down the road it might be possible for OPNFV releases to be deployed by service providers but currently this is a development tool.

An overview on OPNFV’s Continuous Integration (CI) activities was given along with a demo. The aim of the CI activity is to give fast feedback to developers in order to increase and improve the rate at, which software is developed. Chris Price (TSC Chair) spoke about requirements for the projects and working with upstream communities. According to Chris, OPNFV’s focus is working with the open source projects to define the issues, understand which open source community can likely solve the problem, work with that community to find a solution, and then upstream that solution. Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical) gave an auto-scaling demo showing a live VIMS core (from Metaswitch) with CSCF auto-scaling running on top of Arno. 

I will be on the lookout for more OPNFV news throughout the Summit to share. In the meantime, check out Intel Network Builders for more information on Intel’s support of OPNFV and solutions delivery from the networking ecosystem.