OPNFV Matures with New Release of Open Source NFV Platform

Open source network functions virtualization (NFV) took another step forward this week with the announcement of the second release of OPNFV, the Linux Foundation’s collaborative open source NFV project.

The new release, called Brahmaputra, debuted on Tuesday. It’s the second version of the OPNFV software platform. The first, Arno, appeared in June 2015.

Chris Price, the OPNFV technical steering committee chair (and Open Source Manager for SDN, Cloud & NFV at Ericsson), said Brahmaputra delivers “end-to-end feature realization.” That signals the platform’s progress toward production readiness — even if no one is saying it’s exactly there quite yet.

Toward the same end, the Linux Foundation is also emphasizing the extensive testing and validation to which the new OPNFV release was subject. “In addition to the bare metal lab hosted by the Linux Foundation, community Pharos labs were used to release validation for Brahmaputra,” the organization said. “Additionally, OPNFV’s Jenkins-based continuous integration and continuous deployment toolchain has made great strides in automating all integration and deployment scenarios and associated testing frameworks.”

The Linux Foundation also reports that Brahmaputra “contains an increased number of components and scenarios, including support for additional SDN controllers and installers, such as OpenStack Liberty and OpenDaylight Beryllium, which can be used to build the platform.”

OPNFV may not be completely ready for enterprise use as of now. But the new release is another important step in that direction. And viewed alongside other recent advances in the open source SDN and NFV world, like OpenDaylight‘s release of Beryllium in February, it’s a sign that complete open source solutions for virtualized networking are well on their way.