NFV and SDN at the OpenStack Summit Paris

My first dilemma was at 11:40AM on Monday, right after the morning keynotes on the first day of the OpenStack Summit, which was held November 3-7 in Paris, France. I had to decide between a design summit session for OpenDaylight Neutron plug-in design, and three main track sessions: IPv6 in OpenStack Juno in the Networking track, Open Networking and SDN for Next-Generation OpenStack Clouds in the sponsored sessions, and Orange: A Leading Operator of the Internet Era Leaping to Cloud in the telco track. In the end, IPv6 won out, but the dilemmas continued all day.

Throughout the conference, finding two, three, or four networking or SDN sessions occurring at the same time was not unusual. In the main conference, there were 15 sessions specifically on NFV and related topics, many to standing-room-only audiences, and another 30 or so on networking and SDN. In the developer conference across the street, the OpenStack Kilo Design Summit, two sessions were dedicated entirely to NFV and telco needs. In addition, it was a prominent theme all week in design summit sessions related to OpenStack projects Nova (compute), Neutron (network) and Congress (policy).

Added to that, SDN vendors made a number of prominent announcements. For example, three new open source SDN projects were announced: MidoNet, Akanda, and ONOS.

Saying that NFV was a prominent theme during the conference would be an understatement.

NFV Videos from Paris

The OpenStack Foundation quickly uploaded session videos, and the following sessions provide a taste of the NFV content:

Michael Still, the OpenStack Nova project technical leader, interviewed a panel of people deploying OpenStack clouds in the telecommunications industry. The panel included speakers from Swisscom, AT&T, and Orange. The keynote gives a high-level overview of NFV and other problems telcos are solving with OpenStack.

Chris Wright from Red Hat and Tom Nadeau from Brocade talked about OPNFV, the Open Platform for NFV, a recently launched Linux Foundation project for network function virtualization, and they explained its relationship to OpenStack and OpenDaylight.

For OpenStack developers who want to understand better the constraints of NFV use-cases, the changes that are being requested by telcos, and how the changes affect performance, this session is pure gold. Steve Gordon of Red Hat, Adrian Hoban of Intel, and Alan Kavanaugh of Ericsson go over the changes required to make OpenStack a good platform for NFV, without assuming that you are familiar with networking or telco already.

If you want to see a virtual network function in action and understand the management and orchestration features being requested by telcos, this presentation from Toby Ford of AT&T and Mats Karlsson of Ericsson show how an orchestration platform can allow a network function to self-heal and maintain service throughout a server outage, and they explain some of the constraints that the telco business imposes on the platform.

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