LF Networking is ditching a pair of acronyms, merging the Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT) and the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) into a new project called Anuket, which is the name of the ancient Egyptian goddess of the Nile.

OPNFV was formed in 2014 as the first telecom-focused project at the Linux Foundation, and CNTT, which launched in partnership with GSMA in 2019, was brought fully in-house at the Linux Foundation at the end of 2020, allowing for a cleaner combination of the two.

“These two organizations really had a lot in common with CNTT really focused on the specification requirements operational model and OPNFV doing a lot of the integration, working upstream with Istio and other open source organizations,” Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation, told SDxCentral. “We will continue to be focused on the infrastructure layer of the platform. What CNTT brings is a focused, converged operator view of what the infrastructure needs are, and OPNFV brings implementation to that.”

LF Networking views both projects as equal because “if you’ve got implementation that doesn’t meet the business value, or the operational requirements, then you’ve got technology in search of a home," Kirksey explained. One of Anuket’s near-term goals is to help facilitate and promote a consistent view and expectation of cloud-native technologies with respect to infrastructure and workloads, she added. 

“Everything sort of slowed down to a crawl last year but, looking ahead to what one hopes is a brighter 2021, 5G deployments are marching ahead, there are all the services that folks want to run on 5G, there are edge deployments that we expect to go ahead and the services on top of that,” Kirksey said.

Operators have expressed to the Linux Foundation that they’d rather compete on services rather than infrastructure, and with multiple projects under the LF Networking umbrella inhabiting different places in the stack, the organization is striving to further integrate its activities, Kirksey said. 

OPNFV issued its final release as a standalone project in December 2020, and CNTT will be making its final release next month, according to LF Networking. The first official release of Anuket will occur in the first half of this year, Kirksey said.  

The process of determining what a combined release entails will involve the establishment of reference architecture, collaboration with other groups that focus on hardware abstraction, a reference implementation, and then test cases. “It’s an iterative process. The implementation informs what’s possible, which will impact the reference architecture, which will impact the reference model,” Kirksey said. 

Anuket and ONAP are now LF Networking’s largest projects with the former focusing on infrastructure and the later focusing on service integration, she said.

“We believe that we are on the path” to “creating this sort of integration engine that is very good at bringing in innovation, making sure it’s tested, [and] making sure it works with the rest of the stack so we can work in partnership with folks developing certain aspects of the end-to-end technology system," Kirksey added.