LF Networking Passes One-Year Mark with Expanded Cross-Community Momentum

Momentum includes increased Standards collaboration, people and project compliance, project milestones, and adjacent community collaborations

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Open Networking Summit —  April 3, 2019 — LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across networking projects, today announced continued community momentum, including further collaboration with Standards bodies, evolution of compliance programs, new project milestones, and increased integration with adjacent communities. Formed in January 2018, LFN is focused on nurturing integration, efficiencies and member engagement across FD.io, OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, PNDA, Tungsten Fabric, and SNAS as well as the broader open source networking ecosystem. As the projects are hosted under the same umbrella, LFN builds upon synergies to enable rapid innovation and adoption.

“We are thrilled to have recently celebrated our first year as an umbrella organization, bringing continued growth across the ecosystem supporting the end-to-end open source networking stack,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. “The LFN community — along with other ecosystem partners, including standards bodies — has truly come together to evolve the future of open source networking.”

This week, LFN is participating in Open Networking Summit  (April 3-5) in San Jose, Calif.,  through a series of presentations, demos, and trainings. Fore information about ways to engage onsite, please visit here.

Increased Integration at one-year mark

• Open source and open standards further align as panel of experts convenes on stage during ONS North America, April 5, to discuss how the two types of organizations work together to further telecom’s conversion to open source. Additionally, the O-RAN Alliance and the Linux Foundation jointly announced the creation of the O-RAN Software Community (O-RAN SC) to provide open software aligned with the O-RAN Alliance’s open architecture.
• LFN kicked off its second year by co-locating OPNFV and ONAP developer events at the Nokia facility in Nozay, France, January 8-11. The joint event brought together commercial vendors and open source community members to plan the ONAP Dublin release, perform testing and integration of OPNFV Gambia, and foster collaboration between communities.  Attended by 213 individuals from 55 organizations that included 11 end-users and 11 research and nonprofit organizations, more details on results and outcomes are included in the event report here.
• Further aligning LFN communities to ease interoperability issues for telcos and vendors, the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) has expanded to now include VNF compliance testing based on ONAP requirements. OVP also introduced its Verified Labs Program with the induction of the University of New Hampshire-Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) as the first verified lab.
• Cloud native Network Functions (CNFs) continue to evolve in collaboration with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) community. In February, CNCF and ONAP announced the open source CNF Testbed which demonstrates the same networking code running as both Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on OpenStack and as CNFs on Kubernetes.  

Expanded Networking Training Courses – Become a Certified ONAP Professional

According to last year’s Open Source Jobs Report , 46 percent of hiring managers are looking to recruit in “Networking” technologies, and a roughly equal percentage cite “Networking” as a technology most affecting their hiring decisions.The Linux Foundation provides a rich set of training courses — including free eLearning, paid eLearning, and in-person — focused on networking to help advance knowledge, skills, and career development.

Further showcasing the value of these skill sets, the ONAP courses, initially kicked off in March of 2018, have proven immensely popular, with over 18,000 enrollments so far across free and paid eLearning courses. A Certified  ONAP Professional (COP) Beta Program is underway and scheduled to launch in late June 2019. Created in tandem with ONAP expert volunteers to identify core domains and critical skills, knowledge and competencies applicable to the Certified ONAP Professional (COP). For more details on the exam curriculum,  to participate in the Beta, please visit https://www.onap.org/home/community/onap-training.

Below is a list of currently-available networking course offerings:

• Free eLearning
  • Intro to ONAP: Complete Network Automation (LFS163)
  • Intro to OPNFV: NFV Acceleration (LFS164)
  • Intro to Open Source Networking Technologies (LFS165)
• Paid eLearning
  • Essentials of Linux System Administration (LFS201)
  • Linux Networking and Administration (LFS211)
  • ONAP Fundamentals (LFS263)
  • OPNFV Fundamentals (LFS264)
  • Software Defined Networking w/ OpenDaylight and Tungsten Fabric (LFS265)

Additional Project Deployments & Milestones

LFN projects continue to evolve with new releases, projects, and community growth. Specific examples include:

FD.io

• FD.io has added a valuable project to it’s portfolio that removes a key hurdle to adoption of FD.io technologies: Sweetcomb management agent, which addresses deployment of equipment based on the FD.io dataplane into an operator’s network by responding to configuration and telemetry requests received from industry-adopted methods (including Netconf, Restconf, OpenConfig gNMI, and SSL clients) while adhering to IETF and OpenConfig data models.  Sweetcomb is backed by a dedicated set of developers from across 13 organizations (including Alibaba, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Cisco, HuachenTel, Huawei, Intel, NXP, Pantheon Technologies, Tencent, Tieto, and ZTE).

ONAP

• In addition to the upcoming ONAP Certification training course, the ONAP community is hard at work on its fourth release, ONAP Dublin. Expected early summer, Dublin builds upon the work of the Developer Design Forum; “Security by Design” will be an important sub-theme, and a new SDC dashboard called “Controller Design Studio for APP-C” and SDN-C design is under development.

OPNFV

• OPNFV Hunter, the eighth release of OPNFV, is planned for May 2019. It will further the state of NFV around continuous delivery, cloud native network functions (CNFs), testing, carrier-grade features, and upstream project integration. Projects such as C-RAN (cloud radio access network for 5G), AUTO (ONAP automated OPNFV) and Edge Cloud have continued to make progress and are planning to participate. There will again be a two-track release with a Continuous Delivery option.

OpenDaylight

• OpenDaylight, the most pervasive open source SDN controller that helps power over 1B global network subscribers, celebrates its sixth anniversary with the availability of its 10th release, OpenDaylight Neon. Neon hardens SDN controller features and advances support for edge, cloud native, and downstream projects like ONAP, Kubernetes, and OpenStack. Learn more about OpenDaylight’s latest release here.  

Tungsten Fabric

• The Tungsten Fabric community has been named a 2019 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) organization. GSoC is global program focused on connecting students to open source organizations. Learn more about Tungsten Fabric’s GSoC projects here.
• Initiated last fall, the Tungsten Fabric Carbide Quick-Start Environment continues to gain traction. Hosted at Amazon Web Services and free to use, it allows developers using Kubernetes with limited networking experience to deploy a configuration-free Kubernetes and Tungsten Fabric cluster, usually in less than 15 minutes.

LFN will also participate in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, May 20-23, in Barcelona. The project will host two co-located mini summits as well as  in-booth demonstrations. More details are available here.

Follow LF Networking on Twitter at @LF_Networking to stay up-to-date on project activity, including real-time updates from ONS.

About The Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information please visit us at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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