The Open Network Operating System (ONOS) community today unlocked its fourth code release, named Drake, focused on infrastructure enhancements for further software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) use cases.

Drake's new features include enhanced VXLAN support, transport-layer east-west security, and pieces of code developed by Ericsson and Huawei, among others.

ONOS was formed in November 2014 by set-top vendors that wanted to add SDN capabilities on existing hardware. It has similarities to the OpenDaylight Project, which is building an open source framework for SDN controllers. ONOS wanted to “take a fresh start and do a complete release” with a new platform, says Ram Appalaraju, a strategic advisor to the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab), the non-profit that oversees ONOS.

“We are not trying to be all things to all people. A lot of interest is coming from service providers,” he says.

ON.Lab’s service provider partners include AT&T, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, and, most recently, China Unicom. Vendor partners are Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, and NEC.

ONOS is also cozied up to other open source groups. It's working with the CloudRouter Project, has contributed to ONF’s Atrium, and will be included in the next code release for the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV), says Bill Snow, vice president of engineering for ON.Lab.

The OPNFV association came about because of Huawei, which was managing a project for OPNFV and has “really stepped up big time” in terms of writing a lot of the software, Snow says. That work will let ONOS support future use cases including NFV management and orchestration (MANO) and the delivery of virtualized network functions (VNFs) as-a-service.

ONOS has had four open source code releases since its formation: Avocet, Blackbird, Cardinal (in June), and now Drake.

Some of Drake's features include:

  • More levels of security to the apps and APIs accessing ONOS with the GUI and REST-based interfaces now secured
  • Transport-layer security for east-west communications
  • Ability to secure the command-line interface for authenticated, password-less access using public/private keys
  • OpenStack-compatible VXLAN tunneling and a VTN manager, contributed by Huawei
  • A subsystem for adaptive flow statistics collection, contributed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
  • Multicast enhancements from DirecTV, which Snow says is moving aggressively to SDN for content distribution

In addition, Ericsson contributed the beginning of an analytics subsystem that collects data that may be analyzed and fed back into the system as automated actions. This specific Ericsson contribution is targeted for ONOS’ Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) use case.

Separately, ETRI Korea has chosen ONOS as its primary SDN operating system for development, and the Korea Research Environment Open Network (Kreonet) plans to build a production research network controlled by ONOS with deployment scheduled for 2017.

Kreonet’s project will be based entirely on OpenFlow, with planned use cases to include on-demand virtual network provisioning, packet-optical transport, and international peering.