Open source networking technologies are now leading the way forward for enterprises, cloud and telco.

That's the direction coming from LF Networking (LFN), which is a part of the Linux Foundation. LF Networking held a mini-summit yesterday as  part of the Open Source Summit running this week in Vancouver. The LFN is host to a growing number of open source network efforts that include software defined networking (SDN), cloud and telco efforts. There are 248 contributing organizations that span the biggest names in networking including AT&T, Huawei, Cisco and Verizon to name a few.

"LFN is a combination of the largest of the large, who actually want to change where the market is headed,"Arpit Joshipura, GM of Networking, IoT and Edge at the Linux Foundation said during the mini-summit.

During his keynote session Joshipura outlined trends in the open source networking landscape and provided some insights into where the market is headed.

Key trends driving open source networks

Trend 1. Reaggregation is following disaggregation

Joshipura explained that just over a decade ago the disaggregation trend started, with SDN, which is an approach to separating hardware from software in the networking stack. That trend expanded with an approach to disaggregate even edge and access networking as well.

"Guess what? Someone's got to put it all together," Joshipura  said.

The challenge now is that organizations realize they have put all the various disaggregated network components back together to enable a full end-to-end stack for enterprise, cloud and telecom service providers.

When it comes to 5G and open source, Joshipura said that the LFN has come up with plans for reaggregation in the form of something the organization refers to as - 5G Super Blueprints. The blueprints provide a reference stack of projects that can be integrated together to create a complete solution.

Trend 2. The open source networking movement of vertical industries

5G super blueprints are not the only type of full solution stack that is emerging from open source components.

Joshipura said that across multiple use cases in the enterprise, cloud and access networks there is a growing trend to develop stacks that meet the needs of specific vertical industries and use cases. Industries that have been active to date, include energy, commerce and manufacturing.

"What we do is we focus on these use cases that are important to each of these markets." Joshipura said.

Trend 3. Formerly disparate market segments are merging

Another trend is the merging of markets.

Joshipura noted that enterprise, cloud and telecom are no longer working in isolation. Telcos commonly now work with cloud providers. Enterprises work with both telco and the cloud for networking, and the needs and solutions are increasingly converging.

According to Johsipura, enterprise, cloud and telcos are all collaborating on open source for services that span from the core to the edge of the network and including things like network-as-a-service (NaaS). There are a variety of reasons why the merging has occurred, with the open source Kubernetes container orchestration system being one of them. Kubernetes runs workloads in the enterprise, cloud and at telcos.

"Now there is a common horizontal layer of Kubernetes," Joshipura said. "That's one of the reasons why these markets have come together."

The future of LFN and open source networks

One new project that Joshipura is particularly interested in is the Nephio project, which provides cloud native network automation. Nephio got its start at Google and integrates with multiple LFN projects to help create a complete service orchestration layer for networking.

With the trends headed in the right direction for open source adoption, Joshipura is very optimistic about the LFN's future.

"At a high level, from a trend perspective 2022 was the tipping point ,we have seen more deployments of open source," he said.