OPNFV Arno hits the streets

The first release of the OPNFV project, Arno, is now available. The release, named after the Italian river which flows through the city of Florence on its way to the Mediterranean Sea, is the result of significant industry collaboration, starting from the creation of the project in October 2014.

This first release establishes a strong foundation for us to work together to create a great platform for NFV. We have multiple hardware labs, running multiple deployments of OpenStack and OpenDaylight, all deployed with one-step, automated deployment tools. A set of automated tests validate that deployments are functional, and provide a framework for the addition of other tests in the future. Finally, we have a good shared understanding of the problem space, and have begun to engage with upstream projects like OpenDaylight and OpenStack to communicate requirements and propose feature additions to satisfy them.

A core value of OPNFV is "upstream first" - the idea that changes required to open source projects for NFV should happen with the communities in those projects. This is a core value for Red Hat too, and we have been happy to take a leadership role in coordinating the engagement of OPNFV members in projects like OpenDaylight and OpenStack. Red Hat engineers Tim Rozet and Dan Radez have taken a leadership role in putting together one of the two deployment options for OPNFV Arno, the Foreman/Quickstack installer, based on CentOS, RDO and OpenDaylight packages created by another Red Hat engineer, Daniel Farrell. We have been proud to play a significant part, with other members of the OPNFV community, in contributing to this important mission.

This release represents the start of a journey towards a telco-grade NFV platform. We now have a framework to communicate needs, test virtual network functions on a reference platform and publish test and performance results to our upstream communities. The coming release cycle will see many of the things which have been set in motion in recent months come to fruition, and enable communications service providers to envisage the production deployment of a 100% open source platform for the virtualization of core telecommunications services.

The first steps taken by OPNFV with Arno are only the beginning. We have gathered disparate forces from across the telecommunications and IT industries to agree on a set of needs, and formulated those requirements in a way which will enable upstream communities to understand them. The next step on the journey begins with the Arno release, as we move to fill gaps revealed by our tests, and ensure that NFV use-cases are part of the core scope for the multitude of open source projects which contribute to the platform.

For today, congratulations to the OPNFV community on the achievement of its first release!

OPNFV Arno release announcement

Heather Kirksey's blog post on the occasion of the release

OPNFV Arno downloads