SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Open Networking Summit -- The OPNFV Project, an open source project that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of OPNFV Danube, the project’s fourth platform release. As the demand for more robust and agile networks increases, more organizations are looking to technologies such as NFV to bring the scale and flexibility of cloud architecture to networking. The only platform that brings together elements—including functional support for Management and Orchestration (MANO)—across multiple end-to-end open networking stacks, OPNFV Danube introduces key architectural components and evolutionary improvements that meet the needs of end users to enable accelerated NFV.

“Danube represents an evolutionary turning point for OPNFV,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV. “It brings together full next-gen networking stacks in an open, collaborative environment. By harnessing work with upstream communities into an open, iterative testing and deployment domain, we’re delivering the capabilities that truly enable NFV, and that is very powerful.” .

OPNFV Danube brings DevOps methodologies to NFV via collaborative upstream development, integration, deployment, and significant Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) testing automation. Danube also includes continued incremental improvements in baseline features, new advances in network control capabilities, and a growing focus on performance-related topics—especially NFV data plane performance, and instrumentation around MANO functions. With these updates, OPNFV empowers next-generation networking for NFV.

Key enhancements available in OPNFV Danube include:

“We’re seeing the culmination of over two years’ of collaborative work from across the community really come together with the release of OPNFV Danube,” said Tapio Tallgren, lead software architect in Mobile Networks Architecture & Technology, Nokia, and chair of the OPNFV Technical Steering Committee (TSC). “Things like real foundational support for MANO, OPNFV’s sophisticated testing, and DevOps and CI/CD model propel the project into a more robust industry platform for advanced open source NFV.”

Looking ahead, the next OPNFV release, labelled ‘Euphrates,’ will include even more vigorous features and capabilities. For example, the communit will be expanding MANO support via collaboration with ONAP to integrate the ECOMP and Open-O code base as it matures, the cross-community CI/CD model will be enhanced, and the platform will include a focus on VNF interoperability and application enablement. OPNFV will also continue to improve native support for LXC/LXD and Kubernetes. Additionally, the project will be building out analytics capabilities through integration with both the PNDA and ONAP projects.

Open Platform for NFV Project Inc.