LF Networking

LF Networking is a subsidiary organization of the Linux Foundation and brings together top networking projects to increase harmonization across platform and ecosystems. This includes addressing industry challenges through collaboration between end users, vendors, and developers to accelerate open-source deployments. LF Networking works to develop software and projects to provide platforms and building blocks for network infrastructure and services across service providers, cloud providers, enterprises, vendors, and system integrators for interoperability, deployment, and adoption.

The membership of LF Networking is composed of Platinum Members, Gold Members, Silver Members, and Associate Members. All members are required to be in good standing to participate in activities and receive associated privileges.

The foundation has a maximum of twenty-six Platinum members, the number of which can be raised by a vote of the governing board. In addition to the general rights, Platinum members are also entitled to appoint a voting representative to the governing board and any committee, to enjoy prominent placement in displays of membership logos and receive other benefits as the Linux Foundation and governing board deem appropriate.

Gold members are entitled to elect one representative annually to the governing board for every three Gold members, up to a maximum of three representatives. As long as there are Gold members there will be at least one Gold member representative.

Silver members are given similar rights and privileges as the Platinum and Gold members, are entitled to appoint one non-voting representative to the marketing advisory council, and are allowed to elect one representative annually to the governing board.

The Associate member category of membership is limited to Associate members of the Linux Foundation and acceptance as an Associate member requires approval by the governing board. Associate membership does not confer any benefits or rights to the Associate member.

LF Networking is working on an umbrella of networking projects under a common governance to simplify engagement for members, enhance operational excellence, and identify opportunities for greater collaboration and related open-source networking projects and standards groups.

The Anuket project works towards delivering a common model, standardized reference infrastructure specification, and conformance and performance frameworks for virtualized and cloud native network functions. This includes enabling faster and more robust onboarding into production and the reduction of cost for communication's digital transformation.

The Edge Multi-Cluster Orchestrator (EMCO) is a project to create a universal control plane that helps organizations securely connect and deploy workloads across public clouds, private clouds, and edge locations. The software framework is architected to be flexible, modular, and scalable, and is aimed at various industries, including telecommunication service providers.

The Fast Data (FD.io) project is an open-source terabit software data plane that works to provide a secure networking data plane. This includes offering a lower barrier to entry with industry-standard, cross-platform network stack supported by multiple hardware vendors; it increases velocity through encouraging industry innovation; it works to be platform optimized; and is built for broad adoption.

FD.io uses vector packet processing (VPP) and is a software packet processing technology that offers up to two orders of magnitude greater speed than traditional packet transport technologies. VPP's host stack comprises packet, transport, session, and application layer protocols enabling entire networking and security functions to be injected into software packet processing.

The Open Distributed Infrastructure Management (ODIM) project is an open-source initiative and collaborative project to bring together a critical mass of infrastructure management and orchestration stakeholders to define and executive collaborative work in various areas. This project began as a Linux Foundation technical project, focused on creating critical open-source building blocks in areas such as composition, aggregation, and telemetry, to define models and APIs, and to influence extensions to the DMTF Redfish specifications that ODIM can build on.

This community is also expected to coordinate with other key SDOs and open-source communities to automate, simplify, and build consistent and interoperable COTS and OSS infrastructure management solutions to accelerate infrastructure deployments across segments.

The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) is a platform for the orchestration, management, and automation of network and edge computing services for network operators, cloud providers, and enterprises. Real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions can enable automation of new services and lifecycle management for 5G and next-generation networks.

The ONAP platform is developed to enable product-independent capabilities for design, creation, and lifecycle management of network services. With ONAP, network operators are intended to synchronously orchestrate physical and virtual network functions. As a cloud-native application, ONAP requires sophisticated initial deployment and post-deployment management. The ONAP Operations Manager (OOM) orchestrates the end-to-end lifecycle management and monitoring of ONAP components. It is integrated with the Microservices Bus, which provides service registration and discovery and support for internal and external APIs and key SDKs.

Further, the platform provides tooling for service designers as well as a model-driven run-time environment, with monitoring and analytics to support closed-loop automation and ongoing service optimization. Both design-time and run-time environments are accessed through the platform, with role-based access for service designers and operations personnel.

The November 2021 release of ONAP, known as the Istanbul release, included new release details:

• intent-based networking for simplified interaction and network configuration
• alignment with O-RAN strategy to enable new RAN use cases
• continued cloud native evolution for CNF orchestration capabilities
• next-level of functionality for 5G use cases including network slicing, performance management, SON, and CCVPN
• net network function lifecycle management features
• new functionality for complex network configuration management
• flexibility in resource onboarding with choice of modeling including SDC AID, ETSI SOL001
• cloud native deployment support

The platform works to provide security, with the community of developers continuing to improve the security of the platform by continuing migration from Java 8 and Python 2 to Java 11 and Python 3. These security improvement efforts for the ONAP platform includes resolving approximately 550 security and code quality issues, and removed nearly 700 known vulnerabilities.

Two global operators have announced they are using the ONAP in their production networks:

• Orange S.A.: the company has deployed and trialed an automation framework powered by ONAP. The use case, in Orange Egypt, includes automating network services, network connectivity, and resource management inside IP/MPLS and configuration changes such as provisioning virtual private networks.
• Deutsche Telekom: DT is bringing ONAP into pilot production. In the company's O-RAN Town project, DT deployed in the city of Neubrandenburg a multi-vendor Open RAN trial network for 4G and 5G services with MIMO integrated into the live network. To automated services on network domains, DT introduced a vendor-independent Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) component based on ONAP open source.

The OpenDaylight (ODL) is a project developing a modular, open platform for the customization and automation of a network of any size of scale. This platform is expected to deliver the benefits of SDN and NFV to carriers, enterprises, research institutions, and other organizations.

PNDA.io is a project to develop a scalable, open-source big data analytics platform for networks and services. The platform is intended to offer an open architecture for data aggregation, distribution, and processing. It is built to be extensible to add new analysis functions with minimum development cost, provide a chance to develop rapid innovation in big data, build a platform that is horizontally scalable for analytics and data processing applications, and decouple data aggregation from data analysis.

The Streaming Network Analytics System (SNAS) is a project to develop a framework to collect, track, and access tens of millions of routing objects (routers, peers, prefixes) in real time. All BGP packets are pre-parsed by the SNAS collector and intended to be accessed through a centralized APIs. The distributed, low footprint collector leverages a high performing message bus that makes it possible to perform real-time predictive analytics.

Tungsten Fabric is a project to develop a multi-cloud, multi-stack SDN with open-source, cloud-grade networking and security. This is intended to help users solve tooling complexity and overload with one networking and security tool. The tool is intended for:

• connecting multiple orchestration stacks like Kubernetes, Mesos/SMACK, OpenShift, OpenStack, and VMware;
• choosing an SDN plug-in for CNI, Neutron, or vSphere;
• networking and security across legacy, virtualized, and containerized applications; and
• multi-stack and across-stack policy control, visibility, and analytics.

XGVela is an open-source, cloud native platform-as-a-service with features that are intended to be used to accelerate the design, development, and innovation of telecommunication-related services. This is intended to enable new services and help mobile operators develop business opportunities from vertical industries in 5G. XGVela is expected to provide a reference design of telco-PaaS and accelerate cloud native transformation for telecommunication industry. The scope of the project includes collaborative development, including the documentation, testing, integration, and creation of other artifacts that can aid the development, deployment, operation, or adoption of the opensource project.