The most recent OPNFV platform release could be the last that adheres to the organization’s legacy mindset with future releases more tied into work around the burgeoning Common NFVi Telco Taskforce (CNTT).

Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation, explained in a phone interview with SDxCentral that a lot of the updates in the OPNFV Iruya release were targeted at CNTT. She added that targeting will spill into upcoming releases from both CNTT and OPNFV.

Kirksey cited a recent LF Networking (LFN) forum in Prague, Czech Republic, that tied together developers from the OPNFV, CNTT, and the ONAP community. That forum resulted in OPNFV taking feedback from CNTT.

“OPNFV is based on the feedback from CNTT is taking a look at itself and updating its strategy and vision for the next several years,” Kirksey said, adding that the output from that should be available in the next couple of weeks.

Kirksey also explained that the CNTT work was the result of operator feedback on wanting better alignment on their NFVi plans.

“OPNFV was trying to do a lot of what CNTT is doing now with some of the requirements and aligned platforms,” Kirksey said. “NFV was so new at that time that there wasn’t a common consensus on what the NFVi should look like. Now with the years of operational experience under our belt, that consensus is emerging and the operators have said that we need to get ourselves on the same page with our infrastructure so that we can leverage what the original promise of what NFV was.”

OPNFV has been working that angle through its OPNVF Verification Program (OVP). That program allows for the testing, iteration, and a collaboration framework for common NFVi. The OPNFV project also tapped into OVP work that verifies the labs, infrastructure, and virtual network functions (VNFs), and the CNTT. The group is working with service providers to define and create VNF reference architectures for NFVi.

“We’ve been approving NFVi’s for a while as part of OVP based on what we were able to come up with on a consensus on what we should be testing,” Kirksey said. “CNTT and the operators have come in and said that while that was a fine start that the bar needs to be higher. And so that’s what we are doing.”

That work has so far led to CNTT developing a pair of reference architectures based on the same reference model. One of the architectures is OpenStack based and the other cloud native based and is focused on Kubernetes. Kirksey said that the former is bit further along in terms of development while the latter is still working through some planning.

Overall, Kirksey noted that with OPNFV now more than 5 years old, it wanted to make sure it was continuing to bring value to its users. She likened its current status to the Gartner Hype Cycle with OPNFV looking to come out of the “through of disillusionment.”

OPNFV was launched in 2014, with a focus on bringing a service provider view to the network virtualization space. It looked to speed up the development of NFV by putting all of the common pieces into an industrywide, open source framework. And since its launch, the group has unveiled nine river-themed releases, with the latest being Iruya earlier this month.

However, as Kirksey noted, OPNFV’s work has been eclipsed by the CNTT project that launched last year. That project is a partnership between LFN and industry trade association GSMA. The task force is hosted by GSMA, with LFN providing input and access to testing and verification processes.

The GSMA unleashed the first CNTT data release last September. It included the first set of a common reference model and the first reference architecture.

AT&T last month hosted a workshop with a handful of other operators that used that release as the basis for making the CNTT process work across each operator’s vendor ecosystem. Operators involved in that work with AT&T included Vodafone, Verizon, and Orange.

“With the race to deliver this new technology each operator and the suppliers that support them have implemented NFVi differently, even though in most cases using many of the same open source software projects like ONAP, OpenStack, Airship, and Kubernetes,” noted Ryan van Wyk, VP of Network Cloud at AT&T, in a blog post. “The net result is that suppliers of the VNFs (e.g. a virtualized router) must either customize their software or the NFVi itself needs to be customized for every operator installation.”