The Linux Foundation’s ​OPNFV Project​ today issued its sixth platform release, named Fraser,​ adding more support for cloud native applications. And the release brings new testing capabilities that are already being used by ONAP and by Orange.

“The coolest thing is the progress we made in cloud native in this release,” said Heather Kirksey, VP of community and ecosystem development at the Linux Foundation. “We did some initial Kubernetes integration in our last release, Euphrates. This time, we’ve definitely increased that. We’ve more than doubled the number of scenarios that support Kubernetes.”

Fraser also deepens OPNFV’s testing capabilities around functional, performance, stress, and benchmark testing. Kirksey said that some of OPNFV’s testing frameworks are already being used by ONAP and by France-based service provider Orange.

Even while OPNFV was working on the Fraser release, a member of ONAP who works for Orange ported some of OPNFV’s testing frameworks to ONAP. “Orange did a lot of work to port our frameworks to ONAP to use for their ONAP testing and deployment, so they didn’t have to build that from scratch,” said Kirksey.

Tim Irnich of Ericsson, who is the current chair of OPNFV’s technical steering committee, added that ONAP had started to run tests for various components it was developing. But it wanted to store test results and run tests more often. “It happened that OPNFV had solved that problem already,” said Irnich. “In this case, it turned out to be easy to strip away the OPNFV specifics and bring it over to ONAP and have a ready-made solution in very little time. One colleague at Orange did it in less than two days.”

This gave ONAP the capability to run automated tests and store the results in order to observe pass-fail scenarios over time. Kirksey said Orange also deployed the testing capabilities in its own lab.

Fraser also integrates additional cloud native technologies from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) related to service mesh.

“We’ve also started some initial work integrating with the service mesh provided by Istio,” said Kirksey. “Istio and Envoy have become very exciting projects. They’re big areas of energy and excitement at CNCF.”

Envoy is a service mesh project that was originally created by Lyft. It has since become part of the CNCF. Envoy is also the basis for Istio, a project that was designed to provide developers with visibility into microservices without the need to change application code. Istio is not a project within CNCF, yet.

Irnich said service mesh “is basically a little bit like when the native capabilities of Kubernetes aren’t enough for what you want to do — if your application requires more complicated networking — service mesh takes care of you.”

The ​fifth ​OPNFV ​plugfest will be co-located with ETSI’s plugtest in Sophia Antipolis, France on June 4-8.

The recently announced OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) had four graduates in its first iteration: Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, and ZTE.

The virtual central office (VCO) demonstration is expanding into residential services with a virtualized mobile network use case, including vRAN for the LTE RAN as well as vEPC for a minimum viable mobile access network configuration.

Finally, OPNFV is aiming to issue its seventh release, Gambia, by early 2019. Areas of focus will include: cloud radio access network (C-RAN), ONAP automated OPNFV, eEdge cloud, and a certificate management service.