Harmonisation: Bringing open source together

Arpit Joshipura

Open source networking has come a long way in the past five years. In this time, it has evolved from a disaggregation of networking components at all levels of the stack, to production-ready components matured and deployed in various production networks. This year, open source is poised to enter its third phase of development: production-ready end-to-end solutions.

With this comes fresh challenges, the most glaring of which is the current fragmentation in the industry. For open source to move forward, harmonisation needs to take place across the stack. This will give rise to common frameworks between the different open networking projects that will, in turn, dictate their interoperability. Without this crucial step, the mass adoption of open source solutions in the carrier network space will prove impossible.

How can we, as an industry, best achieve harmonisation? The key is a massive increase in collaboration and standardisation, a direction in which The Linux Foundation is already spearheading initiatives. In February, the Foundation announced the merger of two massive projects in the MANO sector – OPEN-O and ECOMP – into ONAP, effectively eliminating duplicate efforts and supplying end users with a unified platform for all issues relating to open source virtual networks.

In fact, the Foundation has, for many years now, been bringing disparate elements of the open networking industry together through its networking events. These include the Open Networking Summit, ContainerCon, and LinuxCon, all gathering the best in the industry to exchange ideas and discuss developments.

At The Linux Foundation, we hope to use our resources to provide the structure and support for a sustainable community that will work together to continually advance the open source agenda.

Arpit is the new general manager for networking and orchestration at the Linux Foundation.