ONS 2017 Tracks Progress of Open Source Networking Projects

The Open Networking Summit (ONS) hosted by the Linux Foundation in Santa Clara, California, has emerged to become one of the leading networking events in the industry. At this year’s event, which is taking place April 3-7, there were multiple announcements about new open-source networking efforts, helping to advance the state of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies. Among the announcements was the debut of the OPNFV Danube project release, providing operators with new NFV capabilities. The ONOS Project also debuted a new release at ONS, providing network operators with advanced SDN features. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the big announcements out of the ONS 2017 event.

The Free Ranger Routing (FRR) project announced that it is now a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. FRR is widely used among networking vendors, helping to provide multiple routing protocols including IPv4, IPv6 and BGP4.

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) also became a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. DPDK was created by Intel to help enable fast dataplane I/O, and is widely used in other open-source efforts including Open vSwitch, OpenStack and OPNFV.

The OPNFV project issued its fourth major milestone release, dubbed Danube,  at ONS 2017. The Danube release integrates DevOps methodologies into the open NFV platform.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF)/ON.Lab released the latest iteration of its open-source ONOS SDN operating system for service providers. The new release includes improved VLAN support, as well as an improved graphical user interface (GUI).

The ONF/ON.Lab also demonstrated new capabilities with the CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) project. ADARA Networking, with partners ON.Lab and SK Telecom, demonstrated a new Virtual Truck Roll (vTR) capability with CORD, providing advanced agility for service deployment.

The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project was formed in February 2017 as a merger of AT&T’s open-source ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy) project and the Open-O network orchestration project. At ONS, the ONAP project released its first code and project documentation.

At ONS, Google engineers Amin Vahdat and Bikash Koley detailed Google’s peering edge SDN architecture with a project dubbed Espresso. “Our fundamental design philosophy is that the network should be treated as a large-scale distributed system and leverage the same control infrastructure we developed for Google’s compute and storage systems,” the engineers wrote in a blog post.