Cross-Project Collaboration a Focus as Fifth OPNFV Plugfest Co-locates with Third ETSI PlugtestsTM Event to Learn, Test and Integrate OPNFV Fraser

By: Pierre Lynch, Lead Technologist at Ixia Solutions Group, Keysight Technologies

The OPNFV Plugfest was held the first week of June in conjunction – for the first time – with the two-week-long ETSI Plugtests, May 27-June 8, with both events collocated at the ETSI campus in Sophia Antipolis, France. Bringing OPNFV and ETSI together for joint events provided an opportunity for 105 representatives from 55 participating vendor and open source community member organizations to perform end-to-end network service testing, integrate with the OPNFV Fraser release, and foster collaboration between the OPNFV and ETSI NFV industry specification group (ISG) communities around the ETSI NFV TST working group activities and more.

The event provided a venue for OPNFV and ETSI NFV communities to collaborate on MANO API testing, Open Source MANO (OSM) project integration, service function chaining (SFC) testing, review of upcoming TST009 (NFVI network benchmarking) and TST010 (MANO API conformance testing) ETSI specifications, and running OPNFV Dovetail project tests against four commercial NFVI/VIM offerings. The TST009 work item, which was iteratively developed together between ETSI NFV and OPNFV, is the best example yet of an important project developed in collaboration between a standards body and a Linux Foundation community.

In addition to the joint efforts with ETSI NFV, the OPNFV Plugfest provided an opportunity for the  community to facilitate long duration soak, benchmark repeatability and performance testing tool comparisons as well as NFVBench testing. We also hosted introductory sessions covering test projects, the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP), Barometer, installers, XCI, and the new Lab-as-a-Service (LaaS) offering as well as hosting a hackfest where community members collaborated on their respective projects, with sessions spanning edge computing, MANO integration, individual project planning, and community-focused discussions.

The Plugfest also continued with highly popular hands-on sharing sessions featured at the last event, with installer demos and introductory sessions proving especially valuable for many ETSI Plugtest attendees still new to OPNFV.

The joint event proved successful, helping drive progress within the community of ETSI and LFN members around shared objectives. Exemplifying the ideals of open source for driving collaboration, rapid development, and increased interoperability, we saw output greater than what we’ve previously experienced. For more details on outcomes from the joint event, I encourage you to read the ETSI NFV Plugtests and OPNFV Plugfest Joint Report.

The community is now hard at work on the next OPNFV release, Gambia, due out soon. In tandem, we are also gearing up for the next OPNFV+ONAP Plugfest, which will be hosted by Nokia, near Paris, January 8-11, 2019. Mark your calendars now and stay tuned for more details!