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OPNFV trotted out its third software release on Monday, which -- among other new features -- included laying a foundation for the industry's management and network orchestration (MANO) layer.
In keeping with its river-theme for software releases, OPNFV dubbed the latest version "Colorado," which OPNVF Director Heather Kirksey described as "a more robust version of OPNFV's previous Brahmaputra platform."
"The OPNFV community, in close collaboration with other upstream communities, has delivered enhanced capabilities most important to the NFV platform growth and maturity," Kirksey said in a prepared statement.
The key areas for those NFV enhancements include security, IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), testing, VPN capabilities and support for multiple hardware architectures.
Colorado lays the groundwork for MANO by focusing on VNF on-boarding, increased CI/CD integration with upstream communities and the promise of "ongoing NFV-related feature enhancements that will further accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks."
While Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. has added emphasis on the open source MANO layer, its effort is more about collaboration instead of backing one single entity among the various groups, which at this point include ECOMP, OPEN-O and Open Source MANO Community (OSM).
OPNFV got its start in 2014 when the open source landscape wasn't as crowded as it is today. Instead of competing directly with other open-source efforts, OPNFV has been more of an integrator of the various technologies and platforms.
On that note, OPNFV said that Colorado continued to forge relationships with upstream communities such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenContrail, FD.io, OVS, Open-O, OpenBaton, KVM, DPDK, ODP and Linux.
With Colorado, OPNFV has also garnered the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices in open source development.
"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 and NFV, Ericsson in a press release. "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."
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation
