“Colorado represents a more robust version of OPNFV’s previous Brahmaputra platform,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “The OPNFV community, in close collaboration with other upstream communities, has delivered enhanced capabilities most important to the NFV platform growth and maturity.”
Key enhancements available in OPNFV Colorado include:
? Core feature upgrades. These improvements come via focused collaboration with upstream communities and are centered on improving foundational support for NFV applications and services. All feature enhancements are integrated into the automated install/deploy/testing framework.
? Service Function Chaining (SFC) now runs across multiple nodes, includes installer support for VNF Manager (Tacker) installation and support for enhanced cloud scenarios.
? Improved IPv6 support includes IPv6-only deployments, full underlay and overlay support and integration with additional install tools.
? The SDN VPN project now enables full Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN support including BGP peering.
? Full support for multiple hardware architectures, including both ARM® and x86 architectures.
? Enhanced testing capabilities. Colorado includes a greater integration across testing projects with additional feature testing capabilities, and increased automation.
? Infrastructure and testing environment advancements. The Pharos test lab project continues to be a key element of OPNFV release development and validation. Colorado brings
improved governance, consistency, availability, and quality to the labs, increasing efficiency and creating the groundwork for a robust Lab-as-a-Service program. See the full list of Pharos labs -- including those participating in Colorado -- here. ? Community expansion. Improved cross-project collaboration via working groups focused on Management and Operation (MANO), Infrastructure, Security, and Testing. Five Committers-At-Large members have been elected to the Technical Steering Committee
(TSC) to enhance the meritocratic nature of the project. OPNFV also continues to build relationships with key upstream communities such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenContrail, FD.io, OVS, Open-O, OpenBaton, KVM, DPDK, ODP, and Linux. Additionally, OPNFV launched its
intern program during the Colorado release timeframe, already providing valuable contributions across work on the Pharos Labs, VNF on-boarding and CINDR performance testing.
“We’re seeing a maturity of process with the Colorado release, reflected by things like achievement of the CII Best Practices badge for security and the growing maturity of our testing and DevOps methodology,” said Chris Price, chair of technical steering committee, OPNFV and Open Source Manager for SDN, Cloud & NFV, Ericsson. “The creation of working groups across MANO, Infrastructure, Security, and Testing also help the project evolve towards a foundational and robust industry platform for advanced open source NFV.”
In addition to enhanced features and capabilities of the platform, the third OPNFV release has provided an opportunity for the community to become even more fluent in system level feature development and testing in support of NFV. This will be crucial in moving past the initial groundwork and into ease-of-deployment and end-user engagement as the platform continues to mature. Colorado sets the stage for significant new work in the MANO area including efforts focused on VNF on-boarding, increased CI/CD integration with upstream communities and ongoing NFV-related feature enhancements that will further accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.
